It's supposed to be about politics, but...


An excerpt from Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It
by Thomas De Zengotita
"In concrete terms, this simply means that making presentations of some kind, and turning actual events into presentations of some kind, becomes what institutions are for. You can see it happening to some degree or another in whatever institution you are involved in, I'm sure, but it is especially true of political institutions. A random case in point, from a New York Times op-ed on December 8, 2003, by Phillip Bobbitt. Struggling to account for why the consequences of our invasion in Iraq were not anticipated, he wrote, 'It is an open secret that the National Security Council's strategic planning directorate is really devoted to communications tasks and the State Department's policy planning staff is actually a speech writing office.' An empirical study would expose ramifications this little snapshot only suggests. The question would be: how much governmental time is spend preparing, giving, receiving, and responding to presentations today as compared with, say, thirty or fifty years ago? And the answer would be: lots."
posted by Stephen at 10:21 PM | |