A week without television

I just realized how I have not watched television for a week or maybe more. Ever since I put it away from my room, Television does not matter to me anymore. I am taking a two class, one is World Art 100. My professor assigned us a project, a collage on protest, so I decided to do it about media and its addiction to the society. Not having any idea about this it suddenly came to me that my absence of television this week had already affected me, leading me to truly believe how the media has such a huge impact in our lives. Without television I noticed that my focus on my schoolwork had greatly improved. I managed to finish my collage in a matter of hours, something I had originally thought would take me an entire day. I needed to find as many pictures and headlines (or captions) as posible to fill it in. When I was dropped early to school, I walked to the nearest newspaper stand. I picked up about three different newspapers. Soon after I walked back to school and sat down by myself, reading only the interesting columns that went with my topic about art. Apparently I found one that caught my eye. The title of this was "Image without context." On the side it had a picture of Obama as the joker and at the bottom of this image it said socialism, not knowing who the artist is, it contradicts the other painting by Shepard Fairey called, "Hope." In it, it said that "context is key," which you can make reference to what we see in the media through magazines, billboards, television etc. is the key. In simple terms what we see is what we believe. If this is true then whos really running the show. This simple example of how an iconic image of our president being distorted with a sort of "subliminal message" included in the caption, clearly telling us that the media is in control.