John berger ways of seeing book analysis

Both were titled Ways of Seeing, and have become examples of intersectional critique, decades before the term became vogue. BergerвЂ™s response to this indoctrination was to produce a book and a BBC television program explaining these critiques in accessible language. This process came with many other social effects, namely the abasement of women and people of color, and the blinkering of citizens to the colonial exploitation intrinsic to capitalism. Commodity advertising was transfixing the working class, as luxurious paintings commissioned by the patrician elite had done for centuries before. In 1972, the critic John Berger and four colleagues saw this engineered stupefaction of the populace evolving out of old visual formats like oil painting, and into television and marketing. It is, after all, easier to discuss Hilary ClintonвЂ™s emails than the sacrificing of African American lives to profiteering prisons, or the endless killing wrought by foreign interventions. This diagnosis is confirmed each time we respond to news of barbarism by scrolling on in search of information more palatable for dinner conversation. Words like вЂњcynicism,вЂќ вЂњconfusion,вЂќ and вЂњambivalenceвЂќ donвЂ™t do justice to the psychological state that has followed. Media veracity, it seems clear, has dissolved into a billow of dazzling information. вЂњItвЂ™s in hell where solidarity is important, not in heaven.вЂќ

John berger ways of seeing book analysis