Blog #2

Three ideas that stood out to me in September were perception, identity, and saliency.  I think it is really interesting how these things tie together. Perception is how a person sees the world as influenced by social, political, and cultural experiences that frame them. Perception is how we decide what we are aware of.  Your identity is how you answer the question “who am i?” This is always changing. Saliency is how your identity changes in different contexts. In class someone may be very shy and not talk, but outside of class they can be very outgoing.  A movie that I think is a good example of all of these is The Truman Show.  The Truman Show  is about a TV show that the rest of the world is watching, but the main character has no idea he is the star of a show.  The producers of the show adopted a baby right when he was born, and created a fake world for him that is on for 24 hours and everyone in Truman’s world is an actor and everything is controlled by the producers.  Truman’s perception of everything is based on a whole bunch of fake experiences that the producers forced him to create to get higher ratings. His identity was not his own and he formed opinions and perceptions based on how the producers wanted to control his life.  Eventually in the movie, Truman realized that something was off and that the same thing happened to him everyday. In the movie, the audience can watch how Truman’s perception and identity change because he forces his life to change because he tries to escape from his fake world.  Our perception is based on cultural, social, and political experiences so when Truman realized something was off, he was able to change. This is where saliency comes into play because the context of his life changed. He found out he was being controlled so at the end of the movie he is able to create a new identity and perceive things in a different way than how to producers wanted him to.  I think this movie is a good example because it really shows that your perception is created by your experiences and when our experiences are controlled we act in a way that others want us to.