We visit the Museum of Television. It's an extensive place, and rather visually assaulting itself, utilising numerous screens, notices, sounds and interactive pieces so that I feel that sense of being over stimulated that I suspect children experience. I rather like that, feeling it to be fitting.
There is, as indeed there is in modern life, an overwhelming amount of information, but the thing which most strikes me is the way that it is possible to create an impression of something in a vast number of people's minds, and, moreover, to make that impression become, over time, a reality. The same tactic has been applied in the media worldwide to women, ethnic minorities, certain classes of people, immigrants and, in certain countries, political dissidents. The more marginalised a group of people become based in negative perceptions, the more resentful, the more can constrained in respect if the choices open to them and, gradually, it is quite possible for them to become the disenfranchised, angry, hopeless or lazy characters they may have been so vividly painted as.
If you were genuinely looking for work but were laughed at everywhere as being a 'chav', or a waster of public funds, might you not eventually shrug your shoulders, learn to hate the system you are in, and give in to becoming that waster quite deliberately, partly to get your own hack, partly because that very portrayal of people who dress or speak the way you do has led to the drastic reduction of your potential job opportunities? Or at least the ones on whose wages it is actually possible to live.
If your family religion has been characterised as extremist, if your friends are constantly taunted or suspected because they wear the clothing that typifies that religion, if the media represents you, a teetotaler, as being a greater menace to society than the atheist down the road who regularly gets drunk and throws up with his friends in the streets on a Friday and Saturday night, how long before you retreat further into that religion, and eventually find your way to the extremist version which you had been so wrongfully portrayed as?
Now these are controversial questions and I am very conscious that throwing blame around is part of the problem when it comes to societal misunderstandings and assumptions, and that the whole process is much more complicated, but I am simply asking whether the media, arguably a greater world wide power in terms of its influence than any government, might perhaps do great good, if used rather more positively.
My own personal opinion, (which may be over simplistic and I am willing to learn more and understand better), is that, on the whole, the media at present, does a great deal more harm than good. I do not believe it is the source of all ills (unless of course we are talking specifically about the Daily Mail), or that it is solely responsible for all negative perceptions. I do appreciate that media reflects what it understands from the public to be what is wanted, and that anything it prints is reinforced by the buying power if its readers. If they were not interested, they would not spend their money. I appreciate all of that. But how much of a circle is it? How much do we want what we want because we are told that we want it? If a programme or series of articles were to be made available to everyone but under extreme secrecy, so that we had no idea whether anyone else read or watched it, and had no advertisements, no surrounding media noise, would the same number of people chose to watch it? We are social beings and we, even as the nature of our media changes drastically, continue to use it interactively. We text each other, we send links to things to each other, we tweet to readers we have never met. Media is self feeding and self forming.
We have the chance, while in Melbourne, to visit an exhibition by Yang Fudong, entitled 'Filmscapes'. One of my favourite of the installations is 'New Colours', in which, on a series of screens n a darkened room, a group of teenage girls pose and preen self consciously in bikinis. It's not just a bit of eye candy for bored husbands (as I overheard someone rather sickeningly commenting on the way out) but a heartbreakingly accurate observation of that particular stage of youth when you have become aware of what you think you might be expected to be, and so, awkwardly, you try on the social costumes, without yet knowing if it fits you. The girls pout and hold poses achingly carefully. They giggle and throw their heads back in laughter the way a model might in a film or an advert, but the way that no body really does in real life. They dance with fake enjoyment making a mask out of their faces, they look, deliberately and rather over exaggeratedly pensively, into middle distance. None are comfortable. Nothing is real. It is all played against a back drop of very subtle sexual imagery, and sudden flashes of real. The girls delicately pour tea and nibble on a banquet which, zoomed in on, is infested with maggots. It captures beautifully that sense, at an age when time is the thing you still have so much of, of needing to act now, of time running out. Of needing to achieve a goal, often sexual, by a certain date, unspoken yet still, very much, a rule.
The media shapes us as much as we shape it. It is our role model, much more than those it uses as its subjects. There is an ongoing debate as to whether the use of very thin models is helping to create eating disorders in impressionable young people. But who is creating the very thin models? It is not the young girl in her bikini on the front of the magazine which is doing the damage, it is the surrounding content. How long can we continue to read magazines whose contents pages list articles entitled: 'Too thin! Jessica's shocking bikini photos' alongside, 'Get your bikini body! Lose ten pounds in two weeks with our diet supplement!' and 'whoops! Serena shows her cellulite!' all in the same volume?
Your bikini body is your body. So you already have it. It is possible to wear a bikini whatever size you are.
Possible,certainly. But will the tyrannical media dictatorship allow it?
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