Good day Nation,
In this week’s class, professor Stangelove elaborated on Taylor Hall’s multiple meaning perspective. All discourse contain the seeds of resistance in alternative thinking. This last sentence holds great importance to what Dr.Strangelove has been teaching throughout the semester.
Every aspect of life resides within a particular discourse. All avenues have their own ability within itself to challenge the status quo. Now maybe I’m beginning to be a little philosophical but let’s see how it relates to real aspects of everyday life. Dr. Strangelove ties it to the social structures, and that social structures are ENABLING and CONSTRAINING at the same time. Each structure (discourse) has constraints that tend to control our behavior. Remember, critical thinking holds the key to resisting those discourses.
Take socio-political challenges for example, within times of heartache we have figures that have chose to rise above the norms to bring change. ENABLING and CONSTRAINING at the very same moment. Figures like Gandhi, he inspired a civil rights movement in all of India when challenging British colonial power. Gandhi’s alternative thinking helped him achieve resistance to the social powers at the time, thus challenging the discourse of colonialism.
Capitalism is also another discourse that enables and constraints. Capitalism allowed many to break out and be creative, and in doing so marketed a product to branch out and be successful. In many other cases capitalism makes it very difficult for people to succeed in the dog eat dog market. An active audience is also another form of enabling.
Professor Strangelove also mentioned that too much enabling will bring to chaos in society, and too many enforced constraint will bring to tyranny. We need for society to keep that structured balance in innovation. This balance is discourses is what can bring to the estbalishment of active audiences on the Internet and the passive audiences that receive and take in the content. With this new-age of user generated content, distingueshes a new opurtunity for us the people to deliver a new message to society along with aiding the media powers to adapt to the times and realize that we the people are changing the amount of control they actually have on the consumers at hand.
Thank you.