Wednesday, August 29, 2012

#1: Response to “Theory for Beginners.”


After reading the excerpt “Theory for Beginners.” from Michael Ryan’s An Introduction to Criticism, I came to the conclusion that he feels, as do I, that most of our society’s feelings and opinions come from the cultural "norm" that he describes in this text. We as a society tend to agree with and take the opinions of things made popular by the mainstream propaganda. Whatever at that time is the main discussion on everybody’s lips seems to be all anyone can discuss at that moment. Along with radio, television and news our opinions seem to be based on what those sources are feeding us and those sources are how we educate ourselves on that topic. Rather than learning the whole situation or all the information, our culture has made a society that is one sided and takes on the opinion of the information they feed us. Thinking back on what Michael Ryan had to say about our society’s view on terrorism brings up a good point that we are told what to be scared of and how to interpret things whether we interpret them as good or bad all comes from the media. Our fears, our concerns, even down to our moral beliefs all comes down to what we have been fed as right or wrong since the day we were born. In conclusion to reading this excerpt, I am now very interested in reading the rest of Ryan’s book and other writings of his. It seems he has a good view on how we should perceive things ourselves rather than how our society or culture wants us to perceive them. We should all more often educate ourselves on the topic at hand, creating our own opinion from our own morals and beliefs rather than only knowing what is told to us about that subject, & trying to having a discussion over it.