In my Communications 101 class, for part of our grade we have to contribute 3 blog posts to a class blog. The following is my second blog post. I just thought I'd share it on here because, why not?
...
You are alone at night in your
house. There’s no one to talk to or be
with, so you turn on the television to pass the time. Lately you’ve been basically addicted to your
current favorite TV show so you immediately pull it up on the screen. You watch for a few hours, and then you notice
yourself getting a little nervous. You
decide to switch to a little more humorous and less violent program for a bit
to hopefully calm yourself down a little. After an hour of that, you’re back to
that first program for an episode or two. You wake up on the couch with the menu screen
being stagnantly on the screen. You get
up and get ready for bed, cocoon yourself in your room, and your imagination
starts to wander. Every creek, every
groan, any sound at all, you attribute to possible invaders, commandeering your
home and on their way to come hurt you in the worst way possible. So, you put in your headphones to help you
ignore your surroundings and are eventually able to fall asleep, but not for
long. You wake up a few hours later and
your imagination tells you that it was a knock on the door, at 2:30 in the morning,
that caused you to surface from your slumber.
You’re frightened and helpless on your own so all you can do is keep
your phone close, be as silent as possible, and hope that when those intruders
venture further they either don’t find you, or they leave you alone. Either way, you’re still terrified by the
possibility that you may not make it through ‘til the morning.
The mean world syndrome is part of the cultivation theory that was coined by George
Gerbner (http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/fa02/about-gerbner.htm). The cultivation analysis theory is the
idea that the more often people watch television, the more vulnerable they are
to what the media tells them and to the belief that what they are being told is
realistic and true (http://masscommtheory.com/theory-overviews/cultivation-theory/).
The mean world syndrome is an idea
within that theory. The mean world syndrome
is the idea that a person believes the world to be a much more violent and cruel
place than it actually is.
The hypothetical situation told at
the beginning of this post was not so hypothetical for me. I went home this weekend to my parents’ house,
and both my mom, dad, and even my little brother were all out of town. I didn’t have much homework to work on, or
maybe I just didn’t feel like doing it, but I decided to watch some Netflix. Right now I’ve been trying to get through the
series called Prison Break and I’ve
been watching it almost every spare moment I have. It didn’t bother me too much until I was
sleeping alone in a huge house. To make
it even worse, my house has always been notorious for the strange sounds it
makes. I was really scared. It took me a
long time to finally be able to fall asleep, and I woke up multiple times
through the night.
This video (Probably skip the first 30 seconds of the video as it just shows violent acts that have been shown on television) is a preview
for a documentary about the mean world syndrome, but it does a good job
illustrating it a little more and making it a little more understandable.
This above shared video stated that two thirds
of the people who believe crime is a serious problem say that they get most of
their information from TV. It’s curious
to me that television is so full of violence and crime and disasters that it
would have such an ill effect on people’s view of the world. I assume that could be contributed to what’s
called the bad news bias. The bad news bias in media shares the idea
that good news is boring and produces unexciting images and photographs. So, the stories the media relays are those
that are more exciting, more full of crime, more drastic, more consequential,
etc. (http://rhetorica.net/bias.htm).
This video shows a few
examples of this bad news bias in the media.
Although
each of the events portrayed in this video actually did happen, they are not
the only things that do happen in this world, but, the those stories are most
often considered boring, so the media doesn’t tell them.
The mean
world syndrome definitely has truth behind it, and as I have experienced it
myself, I believe that more research would just support it even further. The mean world syndrome along with cultivation
theory and bad news bias, are evidence of the fact that we need to be choosy
about where we get our information from and what we choose to believe. It’s important that we use our own reasoning
and investigative skills to construct our view of the world rather than letting
the media do it for us. We must have a
mind of our own, separate from the influences of the media, and learn for
ourselves to differentiate between truthful and false information as well as be
able to spot a media bias when we see it. We cannot allow the media to tell us how to
think and how to feel.
No comments:
Post a Comment