I see, therefore I believe

We live in a screen based society today, not much dispute there. Although we praise technology for bringing us together, enabling us to witness all angles of the world and truly come to understand our neighbouring countries, do we trust it too much? Through YouTube, the media and the Internet the world now exists not only all around us, but in cyberspace as well, and for most people that means on the screen before them, whether it is the television or the computer screen. What people see is what they regurgitate to others. Film theorist like Robin Wood or Barbara Kilinger argues that humans don't have their own voice because they only repeat what they themselves have been told, by the media, family, peers, educational institutions and so forth.
In Jason Sperb's article he quotes Beard, saying, "Its [Videodrome] thematization of media as an ubiquitously intrusive and identity-threatening force, of the transformations enabled and threats posed by information overload, of the dissolution of borders between simulacra and the real and between spectacle and the body, of the politics of image manipulation, of sexuality and subjectivity as unstable cultural constructions is irresistibly attractive to postmodern cultural theorists.”
This quote calls attention to the blurred line between reality and the simulacrum, or the fabricated reality. As a society, North Americans depend on the "capable" media to accurately deliver the news to the eager listeners at home, who believe all that they see. In danger of sounding paranoid, or viewing the world as a conspiracy it is quite a frightening idea to consider how easily images could be fabricated, even in the slightest way. Look at all of the controversy over 911 and the true parties to blame.
The images that are presented to us via television or Internet can be so seductive, so enticing, and so factual that they can lure and entrap even the most devout. H1N1 is out there and it is a "real" threat because that is what I see and that is what I hear on the news. I myself do not know anyone who has died, or even become sick with H1N1. My sister is a nurse at a hospital and she has never encountered any one sick with swine flu. I asked most of my friends and none of them have witnessed any sign of this "pandemic" in person. For me, swine flu exists only on the screen, and I don't doubt its reality. Neither do my friends (though we doubt its severity).The media has this unique ability, because it deals with "captured" images, and we as a general population tend to take what we see for reality. Although the news images are backed up by thousands of other images and eye witness accounts, I still think Beard, and Wood, and Klinger all have a point. The image on the screen not only shows us what is, but also what could be, and we rely upon them too much.