Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic, by Thomas de Zengotita, is an essay that shows how reality has become so different and fragmented than ever before. He also explains how such real and terrifying events are often forgotten if one was not affected directly, even though many people were hurt and many people were lost, such as the event of September eleventh. All the media and the people said that they will never forget this horrifying event that hurt so many. The truth is, and Zengotita explains this by saying how we are all human and eventually get over things. Even though it was such a horrible and tragic event, all it took was around six months to forget and move on. Real things are being taken for granted and they fool the human eye everyday. Drugs, makeovers, therapy, digital effects, etc. are all making things almost “perfect”, causing a misunderstanding for people between reality and non reality. This essay explains how television and real life events are confused and how reality is fragmented into different levels. These different levels show how important the event that occurs is towards the person and how it effects that person. One important statement that I really connected with in this essay was when the author states “…you are so used to being moved by footage, by stories, by representations or all kinds—that’s the point. It’s not your fault that you are so used to being moved, you just are.”(344). This is really towards the event of 9/11. This writer had many points throughout his essay that I agreed upon that showed how reality is really confused such as when he states how a man or a woman look so good, muscular, skinny, or cut, but the reality is that they can have taken steroids, had many surgeries, or have some type of eating disorder. This causes confusion in reality. He had many good points but I felt that the essay was somewhat repeating itself towards the end in the sense that he was just talking about the reality of television and what we see on television.