My name is Victoria Chao, and I am a senior International Relations concentrator. I was born and raised in Dublin, Ohio—a conservative, affluent suburb flowing with manicured golf courses and George W. Bush bumper stickers. As a high school student, I was told that East Asian history classes were unnecessary because “the Chinese didn’t really do anything in history.” Today, I am an aspiring public radio reporter who is interested in understanding how we develop our ideas about the world. The internet and the media, of course, play a critical role in dictating our understanding of the world and our place within it, that is to say, the media can shape the way we behave in a democracy.

On language| Roland Barthes writes, "No help for it: language is always on the side of power; to speak is to exercise a will to power: in the space of speech, no innocence, no safety." The "will to power" is an idea first coined by Nietzche that essentially means that man's primary impulse is to gain power. Speaking is a means of gaining power because of the relationship between speaker (the disseminator of truth, the Law, or what have you) and the audience (those that absorb the information). With the rise of the internet, the opportunity to speak has become increasingly accessible, not only to the the cultural and intellectual elites that have been absorbed by the mainstream but to everyone with access to the internet. Thus, the opportunity to will oneself to power has theoretically become accessible to all.

Barthes's section on Questions illuminates an interesting aspect of social etiquette. Barthes astutely points out that although we question when we "want to know something," after a lecture the questions are often an expression of "aggression against the speaker." Though the speaker may realize that the question is a means of questioning his authority, he still must "pretend to answer the letter of the question, not its address." Each side knows the other's intentions, but they continue to play this polite game of power relations. This passage displays the way that we maintain the relationship between speaker and audience, or teacher and student. The form of the question session maintains the idea that the role of teacher or speaker is one of authority while that of the student is one of absorption. In reality, the student may use this forum in order to assert his own will to power. Both teacher and student know that there is some struggle for power under the guise of desiring to "know something." In the end, the power dynamic remains largely unchanged.

On the "untimely, meaningless (what does that mean?), and hopelessly over-mediated death of Heath Ledger"| I am not entirely sure what Professor Der Derian is getting at with this question, and it seems that most of my fellow applicants have skirted the question, so here goes. Perhaps the question of Heath Ledger's untimely death perhaps is meant to pull us back into reality. We can talk about theory and the power of the media to bring greater social change, but in the end many people would rather read about celebrities than the "weighty" issues that affect a larger number of people on a direct basis (Kenya, sub-prime mortgage crisis, global warming, etc. etc.) Within two days of Ledger's death, his memorial page on facebook shot up to 300,000 members and TMZ (a celebrity gossip site) generated over 74 pages of user comments, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile, gangs in Kenya's rift valley have killed dozens in a 5-day rash of ethnic violence.

Finally, we Heath Ledger's death gives some perspective on the nature of the beast that is the Media. In order to create any kind of sustainable change in X or Y cause, there needs to be sustainable interest and support. For example, in early December Paolo Pinheiro, the UN Special Rapporteur to Burma and Watson Fellow, emphasized the importance of timing after his factfinding mission to Myanmar/Burma, saying “My fear is that the scenes of these marchers will be forgotten and we will lose this opportunity.” Then there was Benazir Bhutto. Then there was Kenya. Then there was Heath Ledger. I think I've made my point.