My name is Marc Ivamy and I have been proposing for the past ten years or so, an essay entitled 'Sex and the City and the Demise of Western Civilisation'. It was not simply a tirade of hate towards the particular late-1990's HBO television series, but an easy target within the context of my fundamental core idea. Throughout history the signifiers of demise within civilisations are parallelled with the popular culture that entertains the masses. From ancient Egypt to the Roman Empire, towards the end of their eras of wealth and prosperity, the people's art and entertainment are dumbed down, created for the lowest common denominator. With this in mind, the age that we live in consistently produces some of the most insipid, insidious, and down-right stupid forms of visual information - it even influences our "media savvy" politicians, who dumb down for the cameras.
Whilst the "essay" never materialised, this idea stayed with me. For the past twenty-two months I have been writing about cinema (mainly reviews of films) with Tom Gillespie for the film blog, the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com, and, feeling unable to express certain issues I have with the world that I live in, I decided that perhaps a blog would be an ideal platform for my various rants, raves, polemics and concerns. The subject has become all pervading now that we have settled into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and as visual information is consumed in very increasingly diverse ways, more and more is produced, leading to over-exposure. Being pummelled in the brain with repeated exposure to visual diarrhoea, creates an antagonised, and exasperated viewing experience - I, as with many others, can be found shouting at the television/laptop/tablet/mobile.
As well as the obvious television show examples, there will be examinations of advertising and it's changing representation of gender roles. I don't want to become too over zealous of the visual media that we consume, as much of the problems that prevail within our collective Western Cultures, politics and sociology will inevitably become embroiled in the writing here. This is a blog that should highlight all the elements of our culture, and interpret them within the context of my main brief: the demise of western civilisation.
This all sounds a little bit oblique. However, it would be awful to simply darkly impress my opinions on the reader, I will as much as humanly possible, imbue the blog with humour (I've been told I'm quite funny - people laugh!). In the creation of this blog I have given myself a challenge, that I have to stick to. I will be subjecting myself to some horrific television (I'm thinking of shows such as The Only Way is Essex et al), as I should always know exactly what I'm talking about - having only ever been exposed to this breed of TV through trailers. Where's the humour? Well, I can't think of anything funny now, but watch this space.
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