Aiden Thieme

Jennifer Weeks

20594 ENG100L

23 January 2020

Is Media Changing How We Think? Discussion

Karen Dunlap - Is media changing the way we think?

Karen Dunlap opens her TEDx by asking listeners to “rewind their mind” to the previous

week; to recall where they were and what they were doing. After a silence in the audience she

proposes them to similarly remember what had been seen in the news that same past week.

Moving on to talk about a headline story on a promising Texas A&M football player who had

been drafted 22nd in the NFL after being predicted to be much higher on the list. While not a

very pressing matter of news, she presents the question as to why “some stories receive so much

attention and others so few?” Karen goes on to give a short history of the media’s relationship

with people’s lives and thinking, starting with the concern through propaganda in WWI

escalating to widespread fear with nazism in WWII. The emergence of the “hypodermic needle

theory” is brought up to describe how researchers felt at the early days of when Television was

in almost every family’s home. That the media “can just inject us of whatever they find

interesting, and we are helpless to defend against it.”

Jumping forward a few decades we as listeners discover that researchers of the 70’s

found this idea to hold no water. Instead an idea by a researcher named Bernard Coyne is

brought to light. That while the media “isn’t that good at telling us what to think, it is spectacular

at telling us what to think about.” The allegory of plato and the cave is mentioned, the idea that

people are chained in such a way that all that can be seen is the wall right in front of them, and
those people live their whole lives seeing nothing but the shadows of what is really going on

behind them cast on the wall. Another thinker, Walter Lippman is quoted “the role of the media

is to keep a community in conversation with itself.” Dunlap moves on to a story from years prior

concerning two young girls that were hit by a car on the way to school that had blown up but had

never quite been dug into very deep. Before ending, she presents the dangers of widespread

accessibility of media; that we are able to cultivate our own “Plato’s cave” and surround

ourselves with what we find comfortable. Her closing statement presents solutions to combat

those troubles; by embracing credible media in order to be informed about what you look into, to

listen to both sides of every topic to paint a complete picture and to start conversations.

The question of why some news stories blow up and others seem to fall by the wayside is

answered by Dunlap, but not blatantly. Keeping the statement from Bernard Coyne in mind that

is mentioned later in the presentation, it becomes more clear why stories like Johnny Manziel’s

go to the top of headlines; they are very poppy, is not consequential in the long run for society

and is of a topic of a huge demographic (making it easier to spread). Other stories (like the two

girls struck by a car in florida) are less talked about because they present multi-faced problems

with which the responsibility does not lie with any individual. These types of issues are ones the

community must tackle, and as Dunlap said, this is difficult. Either it is “too messy” or not an

issue we don’t think we can contribute to, or perhaps we just think it doesn’t concern us. A big

problem we face today is the accessibility of media obstructing our duties to these community

issues. When all the big stories (that don’t have much impact) dominate what people see on their

social media or various platforms, is it very difficult to not be distracted or even be made aware

that there are smaller problems that people can do something about to make a difference.
 After watching this presentation, I felt more in tune with thoughts I had on the topic of

media that I previously found myself unable to articulate clearly. The history of awareness on

media’s impact on society was an interesting point to me, as I didn’t realize that these schools of

thought arose before World War II. Earlier on in high school, I took a class on an introduction to

Greek philosophy that I enjoyed, so it was a pleasant surprise to be reminded of that in Karen’s

mention of Plato’s cave. While I thought the presentation as a whole jumped around a bit, I

appreciated that, as it forced me to connect the dots rather than just taking in information.