This American Life is a video by Ira Glass about a young school boy who creates a cardboard video camera in art class, and how it later affects the other students in his grade. After the boy created the video camera and pretended to do a news report the whole playground followed in his footsteps making the video camera, news report a new trend. Later, there was a fight in the playground and instead of breaking up the fight, the kids in the playground stood around with their video cameras to report the incident. Eventually, the teachers broke up the fight, confiscated, discarded, and banned video cameras.
The interesting thing about this video is that the kids (reporters) cared more about reporting the problem with their fake video cameras than doing the right thing which is to break up the fight. I feel that this video is a replica of reality because news reporters’ today travel all over the world reporting in third-world countries, to tell us about the horrible conditions there; However, I've never seen a news reporter help the people they based their new reports on, they wait for others (teachers) to fix the problem. It is extremely upsetting to see people losing their benevolence once they are behind the camera, even though it is synthetic.
Is it the reporter's job to intervene or to show us what's going on, though? Doesn't a good reporter need to remain objective to report on the news? Once the reporter puts down the camera, doesn't he or she become a part of the news? What else might this video be getting at, do you think?
ReplyDeleteThis video can also be tacking the issue of trends, new technology, creativity and innovation having a negative affect on the population
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