Week 4 Assignment - Khalil Siddeeq

This week's readings all forced a much-needed recontextualization of causes, effects, and greater place in social and informational discourse borne by the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Particularly, the Bishop reading grants a more in-depth idea of what role the media played in an almost play-by-play of news coverage following the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Some questions which arose during my reading include:

1. To what extent is this level of analysis of news coverage even possible in a more modern context?

The Bishop reading only selects a handful of newspapers to truly zone in on, but it still required an avalanche's worth of sources directly from that era in history. To get a somewhat accurate reflection of the cultural zeitgeist no doubt required extensive reading and cross analyzing these news sources in addition to some other after-the-fact soundbites and interviews. It's a difficult but plausible endeavor. However today in the era of the 24 hour news cycle and Twitter X up-to-the-minute reporting, there are not as many centralized places that a casual observer can go to in order to get a general but accurate idea of what the media is generally trying to say. On one hand, considering the media's role in upholding power structures during the time of internment, one could argue this decentralization as a plus. But it also makes the quest to find and plug the outlets which, say, encourage radicalization or spread mis and disinformation much more difficult.

2. What role does post-memory play in the gradual transformation of an event in the public perception?

A personal example which I think of is 9/11, an event which neither I nor most of my peers existed in a fully human context to witness. Yet reactions to it and those consequences shaped the lives of many (including to an extent myself), and destroyed the lives of many more. My only 'memory' of it lies in the photographic evidence which headlines, similar to the images of the atomic bomb regarding the Asia Pacific War, the spectacle and tragedy inherent in images of the collapsing towers. But the way this set of photographs became the dominant narrative is, as members of my generation grow older, becoming recognizable as an intentional choice on the part of the newsmedia to guide the conversation toward certain things and guide away from others. In this case, I can personally identify a burgeoning counter-culture among these young people which seeks to point at least as much attention toward victims of the American military industrial complex as the attention has gone to the victims of that tragic terrorist attack. How the perception of this event will change even more as time goes on is something I am very curious to witness.