TERRORISM AND THE MEDIA
TERRORISM AND THE MEDIA

Summary/Abstract: Today’s concept of participatory media would often degenerate into an irresponsible encouragement and even training of peoples’ taste in violence by means of obsessive pushing forward of bloody scenes for the menial reason of aggrandizing the audience rates. Terrorism is the contemporary phenomenon which would often be a hot target for media’s vampirism. I decided to pay a closer attention to the reasons behind the broadcasting of violence as well as to the final consequence of such an attitude on the side of those who are supposed to guide the public opinion, because I believe a warning signal should be severely drawn together with some useful advices about how to organize a resistance against the mediatic soul-eraser. To this end I pinpointed the Western influence upon Islamic Terrorism together with a case study on Northern Ireland conflict as reflected in Robert McLiam Wilson fabulous novel Eureka Street - Northern Ireland being the most “fertile” European ground on which one could study the use of bombs. I depicted the reason why people become violent – because their reality was stolen from them and replaced with a media-created reality; and I came up with a postmodern strategy by means of which one could actually start using media instead of letting himself be used by it, a strategy based on problematization (the healthy habit of questioning oneself about the politics behind each and every representation/or, of no longer taking for granted what is being served on media channels). The fertile soil in which I anchored all my analyses and solutions was definitely the prose of Robert McLiam Wilson.

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