Manufacturing Consent: An exercise in image analysis
...ety of images, including news anchors, the American flag, an Arabian man, and a few bits of “corporate-themed” art. These television sets take up a large portion of the image. All of this is set on a black background with small green symbols running through it. The piece I am describing is “Manufactured Consent” by Taro Ando. This image is unquestionably meant to be a graphical representation of the book by the same name written by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, well known political thinkers and critics of American foreign policy and corporate power. In the book, Chomsky and Herman contend that media organizations are influenced to manipulate the beliefs of the public. They further argue that the United States government and large American corporations are responsible for these manipulations. It has been said that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and in this case Taro Ando, the artist who created this piece, holds to that tenet. The image is a layered composite of several other pieces, almost all of which I was able to find on the internet. The first layer, the background, is an image of “Matrix code” spilling down the interior walls of a room. This image can be found at ludumdare.com/user/ 178/matrix.jpg. In the Matrix movies, this code was used to enslave unknowing humans by allowing them to believe that the world presented to them was an accurate depiction of the true world. The artist does well by using this image, as the meaning it conveys directly coincides with Herman and Chomsky’s views on the media and the news in particular. The next layer is the “flying televisions” layer. As I stated above, the images portrayed on t...