Media Illusions Shaping Your World

Once upon a time, there was a wild pig and a sea cow. The two were best friends who enjoyed racing against each other. One day, the sea cow got injured and couldn't race any longer. So, the wild pig carried him down to the sea, where they could race forever—one on land and the other in the water.

If you were born into the hunter-gatherer ITA community in the Philippines, you would have grown up listening to the story. Indeed, no matter where you grew up in the world, most of us heard stories that echoed sentiments like this. While they may seem like mere fables on the surface, there's a lot to learn from them—things like friendship, cooperation, and equality.

In the past, stories like these permeated our culture from childhood to old age. But the world has changed a lot since our hunter-gatherer days. Stories that teach us about our sense of community are now limited to children's fables and no longer circulate through our culture as we get older.

All in the past, the job of passing on necessary life skills, history, and information was a collective effort. Today, all of that power has been given to commercial media. In the words of George Gerbner, commercial media has eclipsed religion, art, oral traditions, and the family as the great storytelling engine of our time.

And whoever tells the stories of culture gets to govern human behavior. And therein lies the biggest problem with commercial storytelling: Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook—all the different news apps and websites. How many times do we check the news on our phones every day?

In the past, it took weeks, months, or even years to hear bad news from the other side of the world. But today, we have everything at our fingertips: wars, riots, chaos, scandals. The news feels inescapable; it's like we're trapped in a constant reel of negative information on all platforms and from every news outlet.

If you strip it down to its roots, the message behind it all is always the same—one that plays on our emotions and instills fear in our hearts, warning us against a world filled with people who want to hurt us, ideologies that threaten ours, and unexpected events that are meant to keep us on high alert.

But is the world really as bad as mass media wants us to believe, or are we suffering from mean world syndrome? In the 1970s, Dr. George Gerbner first coined the term "mean world syndrome" while conducting research on the effects of violent-related content on our view of the world.

His findings showed that a heavy diet of violence, whether through entertainment or the news, can lead to a sort of cognitive bias that makes us perceive the world as more dangerous than it actually is. What is the most interesting about Gerbner's research is that it doesn't matter whether we know the content we're consuming is factual, like a news report, or fictional, like a movie; the effect is the same.

When we're constantly bombarded with negative information, we begin to develop a worldview that is highly skeptical, suspicious, and pessimistic. As part of this study, Gerbner estimated that the average American child will have watched over 8,000 murders on television before the age of 12.

Consider the fact that Gerbner conducted his research in the 1970s when the media's influence and its reach were substantially smaller, and you can imagine just how bad it must have gotten. How many murders, both real and fictional, do you think a child would have read, seen, or heard about in the media before the age of 12—8,000 or 8 million?

If that was the only problem with the media, then perhaps it wouldn't be that horrible after all. If bad things are happening, they need to be reported, right? Well, yes. But Gerbner said something while testifying before a U.S. Congressional subcommittee in 1981 that will send chills down your spine: "Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough, and hardline measures."

Could it be that the media is designed to serve people the worst news, to instill fear in us so we can be more easily controlled by the powers that be? This point becomes even more plausible when you consider the fact that 90% of...