Exploring Facts & Reel World (Engaged Critique)

For class we were assigned five books to read throughout the semester. The book that is going to be most helpful for my ethnography is “Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation” by Anand Pandian. As I was reading, the first quote to really pop out for me was, “We often think of cinema in just this way: as a stream of images that obscure reality, screen us from the actual conditions of our lives, disable us from reflecting upon the truth of our experience” (Pandian, 4). I am using the key words “facts & fidelity” so this quote works perfectly for me. What Pandian is trying to say is that we (society) watch TV, cinema, videos, etc. and it changes our perception of reality. We expect places to look a certain way because that’s how we saw it on television. We expect love to be a fairytale because that’s what is shown to us in movies.

I believe the same thing happens when it comes to news and social media. We only see what we want to see. The news channels only show us what they want to show us. We technically do not know if what we are watching or reading is an actual fact. We just assume so because “why would the news lie to us”? Pandian believes this is a huge problem. He says, “Critical perspective on [these problems] is essential. Too often, however, our critiques have relied upon naive and flimsy distinctions between truth and fiction, reality and representation, the tangible matter of the world and mere images of it” (Pandian, 4). When interviewing my next UMBC activist I will ask them questions keeping Pandian’s thoughts in mind. Does news coverage and social media obscure all of our realities? Again, how do we know something is a fact? How do we make distinctions between reality and respresentation?