What would or could genuinely shock you these days?
Sure, there are things, but the list is certainly getting shorter, decade after short decade.
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About Me
- JeffreyLocke
- I am recent graduate just looking at the dirt, writing about it.
6 comments:
mmmm good observation. and i agree with you. i have been helping out in my neighbor's kindergarten class and from observations in there (and elsewhere), i also believe that as generations pass & decades go by, that our attention span also greatly decreases. i think that it really takes discipline these days to keep it up.....
Maybe we have just lost the art of discipline altogether, or at least are losing it. I totally agree. Information overload on our generation unlike any other before. New problems to face; hopefully new solutions. Eek.
Here is a quote from a great book by Susan Sontag called "Regarding the Pain of others" which I highly recommend (I have a blog post about it somewhere)...anyways she is talking about the ethics of photographing other people's pain: "The hunt for more dramatic images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value...How else to get attention for one's product or one's art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliche are two aspects of the same presence"
That book sounds like it would be right up my alley, Kristin. Truly, how many more disturbing images, ideas, concepts, inventions, etc must we become acquainted with before we are fully desensitized? What was completely shocking in the 50s would be laughable now. But again, the quote says it best, shock is marketable and is a definitely a stimulus.
It's all interesting stuff. I'll try to find that book on Amazon.
Thanks!
give me your address and I will mail you mine if you don't mind my marginalia...I will go out of my way for anyone to read it because I think it is such a great book.
31025 Electric Ave
Nuevo, CA
92567
Heck yeah! Most appreciated!
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