Media and perception: First impressions

“ A Democratic civilisation will save itself only if it makes the language of the images into a stimulus for critical reflexion, not an invitation to hypnosis” – Umberto Eco.

Any argument on perception, cognition and knowledge would not be possible without going back to the basic debate about the diametrically opposite philosophical views of monism and dualism in the western tradition and that of advait or dvait in Indian tradition. The growth of knowledge can be considered as the product of the unity of opposites that we all experience day in and day out and yet ignore. Many like me would tend to believe that these binary opposites are not ends in themselves but are only two parts of the whole which the cognitive psychology is interested in discovering.

There are many more concepts that we shall have to address before arriving at any purposeful argument about the role of media in shaping or not shaping the mass perceptions. But keeping a more fundamental debate about defining our tools of analysis at bay, I would like to take a plunge at the topic and allow your ‘selectivity’ and your ‘power of empirical perceptions’ to draw your conclusions about media’s role in creating or shaping “reality”.

In fact, the studies in social psychology about the role of information and propaganda started way back in 1940s when the experiment of binary division of the world was being conducted. The world was divided in anti and pro communist blocks and the role of ideologies was becoming increasingly paramount. It is not surprising that Readings in Social Psychology published during that period includes a very selective range of articles to demonstrate the advances of rapidly changing area of social psychology. The very first article in this book is about Science and Linguistics written by Benjamin L. Whorf who is famous for his Linguistic relativism. However, inclusion of such articles is well understood as the major developments in linguistics have, in fact, taken place almost a decade later. Chomsky’s works had not seen the light of the day and many more linguists working in the overlapping areas of linguistics and psychology had not propounded their theories. But one could be easily surprised as the work of many linguistic philoshophers like Wittgenstein, Bartend Russell and the likes were not included who have contributed enormously in this area. The Chapter on communication and opinion change contains articles on the themes of “resistance to counter propaganda”, Failures of Information Campaigns”, “role of class in political attitudes”, etc. that explains the perceptions of the thinkers that were doing the rationalization during the cold war era.

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