Taglines: All the world’s a stage…
The Truman Show, which is regarded as the turning point of Jim Carrey’s career and has connected many viewers to him, is a movie that has been examined in many respects and contains many reading possibilities. The Truman Show, which is generally dealt with through the cave allegory of Plato and our continuous living in today’s society – in other words, through security, and which makes the audience laugh as much as it makes us think about the thoughts about the modern world, is equipped with many elements beyond its time.
The film never gets old, not only because we have its own little story, but also because of its predictability. Since the launch of the “Big Brother” series in 1999, a year after the movie was released, we have been encountering news titled “Truman Show has come true / will / will be”.
In the early 2000s “Somebody is watching us” in the series of our lives to enter Turkey as we fall very far from the concept. The secret trend of peeping somebody’s lives in all of us was exposed in the early 2000s and somehow it continued to grow stronger. With Facebook becoming a public platform in 2006, social media has become a part of our lives and things have changed: all children born are now Truman. The moment they were born, the places where they grew up, their first lover, their closest friends, in short, whatever built their identity, became accessible to anyone who knew how to use the internet.
The Truman Show was optimistic, its bottom-screen writer Andrew Niccol assumed that everyone would already live in a universe constructed in the form of an unwanted child already envisioned by their parents. Almost a decade or so later, even how much their parents wanted those children, it became open to everyone’s peeps. Changing the security settings from “public” to “friends only” will not prevent them from growing like Truman.
Do not look at me saying kids, we all live life like this, I do not expect anyone to shut down the internet and hit the mountains. Let’s face it, though, there is at least as much irony as the Truman Show, or even a black humor that no one has ever edited. Nevertheless, there was little need to be an astrologer to predict that society could get to this point, and many writers and illustrators announced it with cyber-punk atmospheres they created.
In 1984, which gave the Big Brother series its name, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and more so, the imaginations of the authors created images that identified with today. In each of these dystopian fictions, we can find details that overlap with our present day. The situation is no different for the Truman Show. Although it is not predicted that television will be replaced by a digital world, the viewers in the film are paramount with some of today’s internet users. They even become so identical that I do not even have difficulty in saying that a few academic concepts that are very popular nowadays appear as clear allegories at the Truman Show.
What is Digital Activism?
Let’s start with what it is not: not Redhack. The concept that has been politely translated into Turkish in the form of digital activism is “Slacktivism” which also contains a serious negative meaning in English. Since politicizing is confusing, a somewhat sexist idiom that does not meet its meaning but is quite similar already exists in Turkish: keyboard lad. The word Slack means lazy, that is, slacktivism means lazy activism. You know, we have action to change the signature campaign on change.org, we are talking about it exactly.
Discussions about digital activism continue, is it better than nothing, or is it killing our real activism still the subject of research. The word “slacktivism” is not used in the entire English jargon, because choosing this word means being a party to it. I chose this neutral use not to be a side, but to start writing in a cool and incomprehensible English word, but know that the Truman Show’s great clarification will be how precerious falls into the trap of slactivism.
What is Preceria?
The academic name of an event that you all know very well but have difficulty in defining. The intersection set of those who say that the Gezi Resistance was a middle-class resistance and the ministers who rolled their eyes, today is the lifebuoy of those who say that the proletariat is not a worker but a worker, is a comprehensive class identity including the white collar, the student and the unemployed. Tanıl Bora defines the precariousness that the economist Guy Standing theorized as follows:
Working precariously, so to speak, those who are chronically temporarily in jobs, having a job between unemployment (or the threat of unemployment) are in the ambiguous area… Today, with the flexibility of labor processes, every job becomes precarious, precarious, so there is a tendency that objectively – potentially involves all employees. Also, there is a population that is excluded from exploitation and regarded as “unnecessary” that constitutes the majority of humanity.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt also describe students, intellectuals and urban service workers as “cognitive precursors” in the Announcement. In short, the fact that we are all insecure gives us a common class identity.
Next Page: Digital Activism-Like Postings at the Truman Show
All about The Truman Show movie.
The Truman Show (1998)
Directed by: Peter Weir
Starring: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Holland Taylor, Natascha McElhone, Ed Harris, Brian Delate, Peter Krause, Heidi Schanz, Judy Clayton, Fritz Dominique
Screenplay by: Andrew Niccol
Production Design by: Dennis Gassner
Cinematography by: Peter Biziou
Film Editing by: William M. Anderson, Lee Smith
Costume Design by: Marilyn Matthews
Set Decoration by: Nancy Haigh, J Sanchez
Art Direction by: Richard L. Johnson
Music by: Burkhard Dallwitz
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and mild language.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: June 5, 1998
Visits: 72
