One of my favorite things that is very pervasive in our country is the media’s use of the many different theories that we reviewed over the past week. We have seen first hand the effects of constantly watching the news during the pandemic and the fear it instilled in our family and friends. Without downplaying the effects of the virus, it’s obvious that the media’s constant fear mongering was just heightening our fear in general. This theory can also be seen in many other different aspects of life whether intentional or not. Everyone should normally think for themselves but when the same idea is being displayed over and over it generally makes you think the worst. Coming off of this theory we had the Agenda setting theory which in my opinion is HUGE. No matter your political beliefs it’s obvious that each side has their own agenda and their own checklist of things to say so that people will hop on board and support them. For a lot of people these things are subjective and rely on their emotions to influence their decisions for them. Without going any further into it it’s just very important to just stay objective throughout life.

I personally really enjoyed the two viewings we had this week “The Human Behavior Experiments” and “The Mean World Syndrome“.

The psychology behind what makes people act indecisively and inhumanely in various situations was very interesting. It was crazy to me watching some of these situations and just trying to understand what was going through these people’s minds as they obeyed these insane instructions. Moreover I just recently watched The Stanford Experiment, which was touched on in this video, and it escalated scarily quick.

Touching on what was mentioned above, The Mean World Syndrome goes into depth about how the media makes us believe the world is much more dangerous than it actually is. I’ve been pretty aware of all of this going on for the past 3-4 years as I became interested in politics. I generally do not make an opinion without having enough facts to convince myself it is true or it is worth supporting etc. So having the media use these techniques on me has been pretty useless as I just do my own research and make my own conclusions (which may ultimately agree with the message). It’s just tough to see how negatively powerful the media is when it could be one of the greatest tools created if we used it right.