In view of the recent polls that suggest Stephen Harper's conservatives have a comfortable lead over the opposition parties, I have just one thing to say. Polls are nonsense. I can find at least three other polls online, conducted during the same period, with the conservatives and the liberals neck and neck. So what's the deal?
According to Jean Baudrillard "Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True or false? Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or mere tendencies, or a refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation...?... it is ultimately only members of the political classes who believe in them... this is not due to a particular stupidity (although we can't rule this out), but because the polls are homogeneous to the way contemporary politics operate. Ultimately though, who else does [believe in polls]? It is the burlesque spectacle of the hyperrepresentative (that is, not representative at all) political sphere that people savour and sample through opinion polls and the media. There is a jubilation proper to this spectacular nullity, and the final form that it takes is that of statistical contemplation. Such contemplation, moreover, is always coupled, as we know, with a profound disappointment - the species of disillusion that the polls provoke by absorbing all public speaking, by short-circuiting every means of expression".
In other words, don't believe the hype, learn to think for yourself and make up your own damn mind about the issues.
According to Jean Baudrillard "Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True or false? Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or mere tendencies, or a refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation...?... it is ultimately only members of the political classes who believe in them... this is not due to a particular stupidity (although we can't rule this out), but because the polls are homogeneous to the way contemporary politics operate. Ultimately though, who else does [believe in polls]? It is the burlesque spectacle of the hyperrepresentative (that is, not representative at all) political sphere that people savour and sample through opinion polls and the media. There is a jubilation proper to this spectacular nullity, and the final form that it takes is that of statistical contemplation. Such contemplation, moreover, is always coupled, as we know, with a profound disappointment - the species of disillusion that the polls provoke by absorbing all public speaking, by short-circuiting every means of expression".
In other words, don't believe the hype, learn to think for yourself and make up your own damn mind about the issues.
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