Skewed Reality Presentation

Real News Story
Parody Auto-Tune

About a year ago in Hunstville, Alabama, Kelly Dodson was attacked by a rapist in her own bedroom. WAFF News covered the story, and interviewed her brother, Antoine Dodson who candidly warns the rapist that he is appalled, to say the least.

Rape is a serious manner, and the way the news channel covered it is tentative. A parody was made with Antoine's comments, and spread rapidly across the Web. If you were to YouTube search "Huntsville Rape", you won't be able to find the original news clip on the first page. The fact that a serious matter was over swept by a spoof shows how technology can actually skew reality. When the spoof went viral almost immediately after the original clip was posted, adults and children everywhere laughed at Antoine's auto-tuned speech. The fact of the matter is that a young girl was endangered, and half of the people who have made a joke about the incident do not know the initial incident that sparked the so called "hit single".

In True Enough, Farhad Manjoo suggests that "how you see something is how it really is" (155). Apparently, many people saw it as a laughing matter, when in fact rape is nothing to laugh about. Earlier in the novel, Manjoo proposes, "How can so many people who live in the same place see the world so differently?" (7).

As Farhad Manjoo said in relevance to All in the Family, "Even when the whole country is watching the same thing, in fact, we aren't, not really. Not everyone in America got the joke" (74).

Also pertinent are the two photoshop incidents, one involving an Army solider and the other involving John Kerry. Ken Light, the initial photographer of John Kerry before he was photoshopped into an anti-war rally, said that "Truth is now often ignored as phony" (82), which is exactly what happened with the news footage and the parody.

I'll end this by quoting Manjoo once more, as he reflects that "Digitalization has been good to us; it's given us the Web, DVDs, and the iPod, among other wonderful things. But computerized documents have also deepened the disconnect between what we perceive through our senses - what we see and what we hear - and what's actually going on in the world" (81).

In reality, an incident of rape had occurred, but to many Americans all it did was cause a laugh because technology had skewed the basis of the matter.