A few after thoughts

A lot of things about this week's readings interested me, especially in the context of my paper that is fairly well related to citizenship and consumption, and here are a few thoughts I had after class.

First of all, to give a sense of what I mean about the actual acts of war becoming similar themselves to games (such that rather than killing a person, it's more like playing a game where you kill dots on a screen), I would refer to The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. But in terms of an creative text dealing with it, I would refer in print to Ender's Game and on film to Oshii Mamoru's Patlabor 2, which deals really explicitly with the idea of mediated experience supplanting real interaction in a fairly fascinating way (largely because it's an anime film, and as a result, the portions that present the sections that in the film world are false actually look more realistic than the world itself). You can get an idea of the film from the opening (which presents multiple takes on this sensory enhancing/replacing technology) here:

First part of the opening


Second part of the opening


More directly related on the idea of citizenship, belief systems, and the like as part of consumerism - a couple of notes.

First, I think the centrality of consumerism to many people's lives makes it clearly an important portion of what it is to be a citizen - particularly in certain places (Goodbye Lenin makes it seem like what is being consumed is a pretty key part of identifying with a particular political faction). The film I kept thinking of was Czech Dream, a documentary piece by two film students about their creation of a faux hyper mart - from the marketing campaign up until the false storefront opened to a giant crowd of people.



Second, the idea of lifestyle activism. This is a really fairly poorly written article (largely in that it makes a lot of assumptions about the way people relate to the products they consume), but I think a lot of the points it brings up are interesting because they deal dirrectly with the notion that what you buy is how you contribute to political discussions.
http://www.openleft.com/diary/13032/selfdelusion-and-the-lie-of-lifestyle-politics-core-dilemmas-of-community-organizing