Blog 5: Manifestoon

In Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, he explains about the two groups of bourgeois and proletariat. The bourgeois, the middle class and the proletariat, the lower social class. Yet the proletariat fall under the middle class and the elite's influence on media and trade. Proletariat make the machinery the products with lowered wages while the bourgeois monopolize the "relations of production" by use of the media. By controlling segments of the mass media, the proletarian movement will be "self-conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" and will remain ignorant to the actions of the present and future. Just like how Chomsky had described in his "Propaganda Model" where media influences the public, but alters information to persuade the audience. For example, in the show "Manufacturing Consent", there was a clip of a news station where you see the newscaster walking to his desks with numerous screens of television and computer technology. As he sits at his desk with a stack of papers in hand and faces the camera, it appears he is facing the audience, but faces a screen reading word after word. It is not his ideas, but the news he is given as he reads off the screen. Such information alters the understanding of the events that take place that we are ignorant to the world around us.