Mean World Syndrome and Things Accompanying

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?

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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.