 | Milgram found that 62.5% of his subjects could be encouraged, browbeaten or intimidated into seeing the test through to its conclusion by delivering scores of shocks of increasing intensity to the maximum of 450 volts. In Game of Death, 81% of contestants went all the way by administering more than 20 shocks up to a maximum of 460 volts. Only 16 of the 80 subjects recruited for the fake game show refused the verbal prodding from the host — and pressure from the audience to keep dishing out the torture like a good sport — though most expressed misgivings or tried to pull out before being convinced otherwise. |
✖ Via Time: “Game of Death: France’s Shocking TV Experiment” by Bruce Crumley, March 17, 2010 Learn more about the “Milgram experiment” on Wikipedia. |
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Whatever fortunes our activity might have known, it was Potlatch alone that filled the void in the cultural ideas of an era — that gaping hole in the middle of the 1950’s. It is already certain that history will see it not as a witness to the fidelity of the modern spirit during the reign of reactionary parody, but as a document of the experimental research that would be the central concern of the future. But this future is now — it is the game of every one of our lives. The real success that may be attributed to Potlatch is in its serving to unite the situationist movement on a new and greater field of operations.
Potlatch took its name from the North American Indian word for a pre-commercial form of circulation of goods, founded on the reciprocity of sumptuous gifts. The non-salable goods which such a free bulletin could distribute were desires and unedited problems; and it was their profundity for others that constituted a gift in return. |
✖ Via DEBORD, Guy (1959). «The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now», Potlatch, no 30, July 15. Translated from the French by Reuben Keehan. About the site where this translation is hosted: «NOT BORED! is an autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal.»
Potlatch, as a circulation ritual (studied by Marcel Mauss), can be used to offer a different understanding of communication process. See Bataille (1933), Debord (1954) et Baudrillard (1972). |
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