Not too long ago I was having a conversation with my mom about how she hates to watch the news. I was a little perplexed at first, because she used to actually watch the news before clinging to it as a pre-bedtime lulling device.
She expressed her innate skepticism concerning the biases of each particular news organization and the inherent perceptual monopoly that the media has on Americans. Obviously there’s a difference between tabloids and The New York Times or Fox News and CNN, but even then it is hard to know how much is opinion is mixed with fact.
We came to the conclusion that there’s little you can really trust from this particular realm of society.
Yesterday, I listened to a lecture by Dr. Read Schuchardt, an assistant professor of web communication and media ecology at Wheaton College.
Schuchardt said similar things about our generation’s distrust of news media. He commented that our cynicism toward the news might be the reason that most of us watch Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” or read “The Onion” for our main intake of current events.
In his lecture, Schuchardt quoted author Michael Crichton, who said, “The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine and which are false, because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.”
Schuchardt used Crichton’s observation to connect the
inability to differentiate between reality and fantasy in affluent nations like America to the mass-media revolution.
Information handed down from news outlets is no longer completely trustworthy, especially in the younger American mind, and the things we do take as true are often taken as evidence for and aligned with our preconceived notions.
Schuchardt remarked that the truth derived from face-to-face interpersonal communication has been filtered out by the distance embedded in typical modern forms of communication such as television, cell phones and the Internet.
This distance, commonly perceived as the potential for quicker and more efficient distribution of information, is not quite fulfilling its duty, according to Schuchardt. He argues that because of the general decrease in attention span, we are using the extensive capacity of mass media for things like Twitter and MySpace.
Schuchardt also quoted neurologist Susan Greenfield, who wrote in Mail Online. She said, “Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered.”
This generated narcissism and necessary skepticism has left us confused epistemologically. We don’t know who or what or how to believe. It is then easy to only believe what you see because of the cultural emphasis on visual stimulation.
The question then is how to proceed under these circumstances. Maybe in the not too far off future, the decision will be made for us. Maybe the small gap separating truth and propaganda will blur together through corporately owned news networks where political ideologies are fused with news reports.
But most likely we won’t care because we’ll be more concerned with our friend’s “tweeting” about a trip to the grocery store.
Reach Houston at hfriend1@asu.edu.
