"Three days later, like turkey buzzards, settling on a corpse, the reporters came" (Huxley 169).
The media in Brave New World is very similar to the media we have today. It is amazing how accurate Huxley's theories are. As soon as something happens it is immediately on the news or in a tabloid magazine. The novel also said after John pushed one of the reporters, there was a story on The Hourly Radio about the incident eight minutes after it occurred. The media and paparazzi never seem to rest.
Do people really demand to know about stories as soon as they happen? The media claims to be giving people what they want, but are people this interested in celebrities and other news? Maybe the media fuels peoples' desire for news by trying to make everything seem important. There are many news stories every day. This reminds me of something Postman addressed in Amusing Ourselves to Death. When discussing the telegraph he said, "To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them" (70). Today this is very common. No one can discuss one subject very long because they do not know much about it, they only of the the story's existance. At one point, most people were well informed, but that sounds so long ago.
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ReplyDeleteIt is true that news really give us way more information than we need. After all, the next day, there will be more news and the news from the previous day will no longer be remembered. I believe that this makes us grow accustomed to memorizing things quickly and then forgetting them just as quickly. For example, when we study for a test, we are really just memorizing it for the next day and let it out of our minds after that.
ReplyDeleteMario Ayala
Postman also points this out too that a lot of information today is just irrelevant to our lives. But the thing is that some people just love to learn about this information. The information entertains them. I personally don't care about tabloids, but just as Huxley predicted, useless information appears more and more because we want more.
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