I'm not too sure what to make of this lecture, as seemed to have a similar underlying message as certain points of the Globalisation Lecture did, especially Chomsky's idea of manufacturing consent and the filters which only allow the successes of Western civilisation to be broadcasted.
This lecture was about taking that principle in a broader context, and was about how you can't always believe everything you see, which I would've thought would've been a fairly obvious concept to most people at an Art College anyway.
It reminded me very much of the first lecture from last year, where Fred explained the difference between an apple and a picture of an apple, and how important it is to understand the difference. The picture of an apple is a representation of an apple, you've got accept that the apple may not look like it does in the picture, but the key elements of what you know an apple has are the same as the key elements as the picture of the apple has, such as the round shape and the little stalk coming out of the top. If you go through life being concerned that when you buy an apple it's not going to look like the picture of the apple, it's going to make it more difficult for you to eat apples.
In the same way, if you're too concerned that the media may be mis-representing something, you're going to have a difficult time understanding it because you'll always be looking at it from a point of view which you are creating that may (or may not be) the real absolute truth. By looking at it from the presented view you at least get a portion of the truth, and from there it's up to you to investigate it to get the entire truth. Going back to the globalisation lecture again, it should be clear that everything that's presented to you as 'the truth' will have some sort of bias, and I think it's important for people to make their own decisions on what they believe the truth is, be it what they're presented with, what they think could be hidden behind what's being presented, or, most likely, a mixture of the two.
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