"Dear Ann: I have a problem; I have two brotherds. One brother is in Television, the other was put to death in the electric chair for murder. My mother died from insanity when I was three years old. my two sisters are prostitutes, and my father sells narcotics to high school students. Recently I met a girl who was just releaced from a reformatory where she served time for smothering her illigitimate child to death, and I want to marry her. My problem is - if I marry this girl - should I tell her about my brother who is in television?"
Anonymous letter quoted by Ate de Jong as an hommage to Douglas Sirk and Orson Welles, in The Cinema Militans Lecture 1996/1997, Dutch Film Festival Foundation, Utrecht 1997.
´ All what we see on TV is a media production, even though it is presented as a real fact. Once we believe it, we feel artificially concern with the other, and we seek feelings of comfort. ´
The moral responsibility for the Other on the name of an idea of goodness doesn’t mean interiorizing the Other within an alienated Same whereby the media plays a central role. All military interventions in our time (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and others) where engaged in the name of the mediatised ideas of the Same and Unique good world of democracy, freedom et cetera. The world is pluralistic and diverse. And when we fail to consider this pluralism and we think that universalism means annihilation of differences, our relations to the Other will remain insane because it remains based on the reciprocal exclusion. We must resist this infamous media hypnosis and make the “language of the image a stimulus for reflection”, as Umberto Eco wrote in The Screen Education Reader(7): Cinema, Television, Culture . In other words: there is a new necessity to keep being human and stop deluding ourselves that we are gods, because we are simply not. We need more than ever: “… to learn about the media in order to prevent being their toy, to learn the images and the sounds just like we learn to read and write in order to once again make conscience available, so that the rush of urgency is not a whirlwind in an unstructured world ”.
Full story in : http://www.eutopiainstitute.org/2012/12/are-we-media-cannibals/
