How much is our thinking shaped by the mass media? I don't just mean

[raccoon]

news or so-called news. I mean impressions of an era, a generation, an ethnic group, etc.

For instance, I think possibly many people who aren't old enough to remember the 1960's think that the majority of young people at the time were hippies, out protesting, smoking pop, starting communes, etc. They might also think (due to, most notably, THE BIG CHILL) that the vast majority of those hippies later turned conservative, sold out, and went to work for the Establishment making the megabucks. (I only wish THAT were true--the megabucks part anyway! :-))

Now, I don't remember WWII; I wasn't born yet. But it's easy to get the idea from movies, novels, etc., that every young American man was anxious to sign up, to lie about his age if need be, and go fight the Japanese or the Germans. I think most of them were probably WILLING to do so, but not sweating bullets to join up.

To go further back in history, I have known people who believe that the vast majority of whites in the antebellum South were rich plantation owners, due to the influence of movies, books, etc. (most notably GONE WITH THE WIND).

And of course, this sort of thing isn't limited to the past. Anyway, just something to think about.

[raccoon]

1. If anyone knows of any books/articles which they've read that deal with this,

and they could recommend, please do so.

[Iris]

3. You might do a search using the terms "media literacy"

on the internet or your library's catalog. That might be someplace to start anyway.


I have read things about young people and how savvy they actually are about the media - realizing what is meant to sell them something vs what is reality.

[On the Road]

5. The Classic Work on Shaping Opinion

is Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Can't think of anything on a par with it.

There are lots of progressive writers who present a range of historical opinions that are usually no longer heard today (eg, Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States), but few deal with the actual process by which citizens form their opinions.

The principles of Manufacturing Consent apply not just to the mass media, but to the range of opinions in any group you are a part of. It's easy to see it at work in right-wingers; less easy to see on the side you agree with.

One of the unusual things about the 60s counterculture was how much it deviated from this. People spouted off all kinds of ideas, some of them silly and impractical and some mature and forward-looking. It was unnerving at the time because it was so difficult to get a handle on. I think it was a product of valuing extreme openness and novelty as well as accepting divergent beliefs in others.

[old mark]

9. Ribofunk, I really enjoyed the 60's simply because

of the parity of ideas-Even the most half-baked philosophy had followers, and some very good things came out of it, at least in the beginning. I was very saddened when the whole thing became commercialized beyond belief on one side, and then radicalized by the ridgid extremeists on the other. Still, some good things and ideas seem to have survived, and for a while there in the beginning it was even fun.

mark

[Iris]

11. interesting. Do you see any parallels to what's going on today?

I mean, the internet is a place where even the most half-baked philosophies have followers. Or do you think the commercial aspects just get in the way too much?

BTW - Have you ever read Peter Coyote's memoir "Sleeping Where I Fall"? I thought it was excellent.
http://www.jackmagazine.com/issue4/coyote.html

[On the Road]

12. When I Said The 60s were "Unnerving"

I was thinking of may parents' generation. I was a young teenager and thought it was great although I really wasn't a major participant. A lot of it had to do with being cool with all kinds of strange ideas. 17-year-old believed they could escape the weight of history, found a new nation, revolutionize technology, transcend the physical plane, all at the same time.

People like Stewart Brand were serious and made real contributions. People like Paul Hawken started out in the counterculture and moved on taking their basic philosophy with thim. People like Terrence McKenna provided only a transcendent imagination.

I don't know how something like that could last. Hunter Thompson said it best:

And that, I think, was the handle---that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting---on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark---the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back

[undeterred]

18. And amazingly, some people lived through the 60's

and still missed it, like my mother. She once told me that the 60's were about raising her children and she didn't pay much attention to anything else. She never heard of Betty Friedan.

[Echo In Light]

7. ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN, by Herbert Marcuse

http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/christian/marcuse/odm.html

Media Control:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/Media_Control.html

"The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth will then become a consensus-truth accepted by many individuals unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth promulgated by the propaganda system - however irrational - stands a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem self-evident common sense." ~ David Edwards, author of Burning All Illusions

The Glass Teat, by Harlan Ellison

Boxed In: The Culture of TV, by Mark Crispin Miller
http://books.google.com/books?id=Lhsg1ZZ3hMQC&dq=boxed+in+the+culture+of+tv+mark+crispin+miller&pg=PP1&ots=-uaglzTLYp&sig=O9cT2MH1ub6sPME0SFAVOpk2-lo&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3DBoxed%2BIn:%2BThe%2BCulture%2Bof%2BTV:%2BMark%2BCrispin%2BMiller%26btnG%3DSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail

Orwell Rolls In His Grave:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4467655342219448521&q=orwell+rolls&ei=GMpXSJOZHJX84ALdueCxDw&hl=en

[raccoon]

8. Thanks, Echo. I'll look into these. nt

[Echo In Light]

19. Here's another interesting take...

Official Culture in America:
A Natural State of Psychopathy?
Laura Knight-Jadczyk

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm

[awnobles]

20. Rudolph Steiner's

"Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, a Philosophy of Freedom" explains very clearly the way outside forces shape our free will. All organizations exercise their power to effect opinion/create a perceived reality. It has been done from the beginning of time through symbols and art. Organizations use the media of the age (printing presses, radio, television) to do this and use their assets to control the media by ownership or influence. This is the model that has been used to control the masses for millennia. The media delivers the message and it becomes the perceived reality, mandating the organization's desired outcome. Fortunately the advent of the internet gives the people more access to content that is not dictated by organizations and an awakening of sorts is in the works. Awareness of the Propaganda State limits its effectiveness, my hope is that knowledge will set us free.

[Iris]

2. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I work in higher ed and sometimes get

disgusted with myself for basing my opinion on a whole generation on what I see in the media when in reality the kids I work with are not like that at all. I can't even imagine how dumb-headed I'd be if I weren't working with college students!

I've also thought of it in terms of what people consider to be attractive and the idea that everyone of a certain age is attractive and everyone not of that age is not. When, in reality, the hot moms boys I knew in high school lusted after were well beyond what the media would have us believe is "hot" now.

[CBHagman]

4. It's something I think about a great deal.

My particular fascination deals less with how generations and ethnic groups are presented and more with the use of statistics (or, more often than not, abuse of statistics) and with the reporting of anxiety-producing stories. Nightly news and some of the magazines targeted at women are mad keen on the anxiety-producing story: Is your water safe? Are you going to lose your job? Is that a monster under your bed? AIEE! :scared:

I do think that overconsumption of media, especially unquestioning consumption, which I would never accuse you of, raccoon, affects our impressions and even our moods.

And statistics are driving me crazy, particularly polling. I like to refer to it as taking the national temperature every five minutes. We've got to get that device out of the national orifice occasionally...

[raccoon]

6. I get sick of statistics and polls too. Gosh, I can remember when one rarely heard

about either one. Ah, the golden haze of yesteryear.... :silly:

[onenote]

10. been happening since before the advent of the mass media

The reason that most people believe that Jesus was a white caucasian with European features is that is how the popular culture -- ie., paintings, typically in churches -- depicted him. And that was long before the advent of a "mass media" as we know it today.

[libodem]

13. Great topic, raccoon

plenty to think about. Brings to mind the whole concept about naming generations because of a common theme associated with it. I don't know the name of the book but there is one. I've always intended to read it. Lots of good info in this thread, I'm bookmarking and recommending.

[Bluerthanblue]

14. Ahhh.... great question- important question-

some answers I think are interesting:


The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator


It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. ~Bill Vaughan

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. ~A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture


History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. ~George Santayana

Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false. ~Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World


The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers, out of the irreconcilable opinions of men. ~F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution


Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made. ~John Terraine


History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others. ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary


The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals. ~Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead





The "argument without end":

To expect from history those final conclusions which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines is in my opinion to misunderstand its nature… The scientific method serves above all to establish facts; there is a great deal about which we can reach agreement by its use. But as soon as there is a question of explanation, of interpretation, of appreciation, though the special method of the historian reamins valuable, the personal element can no longer be ruled out, that point of view which is determined by the circumstances of his time and by his own preconceptions…. we cannot see the past in a single communicable picture except from a point of view, which implies a choice, a personal perspective. It is impossible that two historians, especially two historians living in different periods, should see any historical personality in the same light… A man’s judgement - for however solemnly some people may talk about the lessons of History, the historian is after all only a man sitting at his desk - a historian’s judgement, then, may seem to him the only possible conclusion to draw from the facts, he may feel himself sustained and comforted by his sense of kinship with the past, and yet that judgement will have no finality. Its truth will be relative, it will be partial…The study even of contradictory conceptions can be frutiful. Any one thesis or presentation may in itself be unacceptable, and yet, when it has been jettisoned, there remains something of value. Its very critics are that much richer. History is indeed an argument without end.
(from historian Pieter Geyl's book "Napoleon: for and against")

[The River]

15. We Are The Product Of An Illusion

From Joe Bageant at http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2005/12/the_simulacran_.html

" The average American spends about one third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are (the best and only important tribe on the planet.) It schedules our cultural illusions of choice, displays pre-selected candidates in our elections, or types of consumer goods. It regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons, which are now governed by the electrons of the illusion. We live within a media generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall to the faceless legions of within it.

Our civilization, our culture, in as much as it can be said to exist in any cohesive way, is based upon two things, television and petroleum. Whether you are a custodian or the President, your world depends upon an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil. As in all produced illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what passes for reality, and real people performing for television. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, grappling over the feeding tube on Terri Schiavo; real actors portray non-actors in "reality shows." Michael Jackson shows up for court in pajamas and Jeff Weise shows up for class with a gun. The demand for "newsmakers" is relentless as the empire’s corporate cultural machinery weaves the warp of consumer illusions that make up our notion of individualism, and the weft of democratic mythology that constitutes our political system. This is by no means a free country and given the intense luminosity of the hologram, we cannot even see freedom from here, and probably would not recognize it if we could. Moreover though, we cannot tear our eyes away from the great flickering glow of the hologram."

[melm00se]

16. there have been numerous academic

studies of the influence and impact of mass communication upon an individual's behavior and opinions (my BA is in Communication), you may want to hit your local university library and do a bit of research.

have fun

[Junkdrawer]

17. Well, DU just spent a week debating Tim Russert's death...

Enough said.

[leftofthedial]

21. I think for the huge majority,

the mass media define their world view almost totally.

[tavalon]

22. Most of the people in the sixties were hippies?

No, just a few and quite a few more were doing it because it was cool. Those people went on to the next big thing and became yuppies and so on. But the true hippies remained hippies and some of the communes they started are still going. Many of the community based organic gardens are run by hippies to this day.

Yeah, history is an odder, more malleable thing than one might imagine.