Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Blog 11_Wk_8_The_Yes_Men

The “Yes Men’s” critique of media focuses on how corporations use the media to subconsciously play with the human psyche, through the use of natural disasters, or emotional events that really touch people’s hearts. This leads consumers to believe the companies in question actually care, but they are just there to sell a product, albeit subtle so people think that they are in control of what they are investing in, but are really not.

To accomplish this, the Yes Men utilize pranks, which are to a high extreme to highlight how easily and absurdly, that these companies manipulate their consumers or investors. This is evident in their prank against DOW, admitting to their responsibility in the Bhopal event, causing their stock to plummet, yet juxtaposed with the fact that most of the investors who lost out were working class people, it sets up an interesting paradox. All of this directly relates to the “subconscious”, as mentioned earlier, and how society is unassumingly being manipulated without realizing it, and the Yes Men show us this simply by performing hyper-exaggerated stunts.

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