Reference and Education: Can We Track Media Brainwashing On ...

One thing which bothers me is how easily people meld their personal opinions on current events based on the media and news sources they consume. Now then, I have a somewhat difficult question to ask you, I'm going to make you think today.

We all know that mass media has a tendency to brainwash our population. Just as corporate marketing and branding are able to persuade people to change their life plan, drive a certain car, wear certain clothes, and covet certain things. Political propaganda is quite similar to all of this, so is perhaps indoctrination from the church. Yes, I haven't told you anything you don't already know.

Nevertheless, since we live in the information age, and the age of big data, I now wonder if it is possible if we can track media brainwashing not just on the whole of humanity or the population of our society, but on an actual individual bases. Can we watch it all in real time, perhaps through social media posts, blogs, tweets, and other online correspondence the natural evolution of trends in our society and the dynamics of their changing opinion, again, on an individual basis?

There is a very decent research paper worthy of mention titled; "Extracting Opinions, Opinion Holders, and Topics Expressed in Online News Media Text," by Soo-Min Kim and Eduard Hovy from the USC Information Sciences Institute, date: July 29, 2006.

What if we did this, what if we track the number of news articles which were pro or con on any given issue, and then what if we surveyed the people before-hand, and then afterwards? And what if we broke it down by individual, and slowly watched how their opinion had changed over time. Perhaps it might be an issue about race, religion, sexual preference and orientation, or even one about personal savings, economics, or political leadership.

I bet what we'd find is that not only does the society as a whole track very closely to the mass media brainwashing propaganda, but that we can also understand how people change their opinion based on what they view online, see in the media, and how their friends are affected by the same. In fact, I'm so sure of this because I spent a good deal of time talking to people at coffee shops, asking them which news program they watched the night before, and their exact opinions on any given topic, only to find that their opinions matched whatever they saw the night the prior.

Perhaps in the end after doing such research we might figure out that the mass media is so powerful and so strong that we need to rein it in a bit. Or rather, share all the data we collect with each and every individual in our society, and teach how propaganda is melding the minds of their friends and themselves as they go about their lives. Should we warn them about the reality, and prove it to them with empirical data?

Some might say that that information would be scary, that it would challenge everything we know, think, and do to the point that people wouldn't feel as if they still had self-destiny. Yes, I'm aware of that, but maybe that's my point, they don't know, and the individual should, because in the end the individual is all that is important, and we are not strong as a nation until each and every individual is thinking. And with that I hope you will please consider it all and think on it.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on the Future of Education. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net

Source: http://13pisos.blogspot.com/2013/02/can-we-track-media-brainwashing-on.html

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