Media and Reality

Reality is a funny thing. From the earliest stages of cognitive thought we take reality to be what we perceive, understand, and assume. For example, as a small child, I believed that my grandmother had served a stint in a pirate navy in her youth because she loved telling me fantastical stories. Today I know that the farthest away she's been from her home in Penn Hills is Toronto and that she had been a telephone operator, not a pirate, as a young woman. I believed her stories because (aside from the obvious "because I was eight") I had nothing else to base my opinion upon. In other words, the only media I had were Grandma's stories. Had I engaged other media (maybe my mom) I would have found evidence to refute my beliefs.

It is in this way that one's sense of reality is drastically limited. Today, our reality can be limited by the media as much as it can by imaginative grandmothers when we are children, albeit for different reasons. One example was used early in this course: the natives of our continent had no idea that there were any white men headed to a "New World" and at first believed that the canvas sails of the explorer fleets were deities. Furthermore, the Europeans hadn't a clue that they'd encounter people there, thus limiting the respective realities of both cultures. In a more modern vein, the reading includes an account of an island inhabited by French, English, and German residents in the pre-Great War months. Since the mail ship was still weeks away, the citizens carried on as friends until they heard the news of the Archduke's death and the subsequent violence. Now their view of reality was totally different, despite the fact that the impetus of that shift occurred long before.

In the interest of length and readability, I'll make a new post for the rest of the topic.