Well, I have no doubt that is pretty true in the U.S. But, I attend a physics class, and the concepts and formuals are not simple. Yet, the vast majority of the class is doing extremely well, I'm an average at best student. So, people seem fully able to take in complex concepts.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to ask
1.Why does the media treat the average person as an idiot?
2.If the average person is not an idiot, then why did the candidate celebrating idiocy win the U.S election?

[ 08 December 2004: Message edited by: Adam T ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Adam T:
But, I attend a physics class, and the concepts and formuals are not simple. Yet, the vast majority of the class is doing extremely well, I'm an average at best student. So, people seem fully able to take in complex concepts.

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[ 08 December 2004: Message edited by: Albireo ]

There are several factors involved.
A major one is media. For the last 50 or so years, television has been the main source of information for the vast majority of people. Even if you discount the reliability of television news reporting, a 2-minute segment can't cover all aspects of any subject. So people get used to incomplete, shallow information.
Television has also reduced people's attention-span to fast approaching zero. (Anything you can't tell me in 30 seconds isn't worth knowing.)
Television is commercial. Everything on it has to sell something, or it gets no precious air-time.
The people who pay for the programming want to sell things that nobody needs, so they don't like a critical audience: they like an audience of credulous, insecure, greedy infants. They've gone to a lot of trouble to raise their kind of citizen. Over the 25 or so years that i've been keeping track, the maturity level of tv programming has declined to age 7 (bathroom jokes, scary monsters and assurances that Momma loves you, and Daddy protects you, no matter how badly you behave).
Television programming celebrates the average. While lowering the average by a percentage point or two, each year.
GWB is the ultimate television president. They just don't come any more average. The most ordinary of ordinary guys can identify with him. Yet, he has all this power! What's not to trust?

[ 09 December 2004: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

Still, when one compares even the best tv programs of now to, at least, what I've heard of 1950's programs like Playhouse 90, the 50's programs seemed designed to be more challenging.

The justifications for banning drugs could pretty much be used on television (addictive, addles the mind, reduces productivity). It raises the question that had people known the effects television would have on the culture and on individuals would television have been banned in the 1940's?

2.I think it has been more or less proven that television does disengage the viewer from 'thinking'. This is why, for me personally, I prefer to listen to radio interviews and documentaries over television programs even for science discussions, even though science can be very visual.

There was nothing particularly wrong with Gilligan's Island - it was just silly, not evil. There is nothing particularly wrong with simple entertainment, as long as its core values reflect, illustrate and reinforce the stated values of the society.
(personal liberty, justice, tolerance, brotherhood... all the things Americans still pay lip-service to)
What's wrong is that, in catering to a lower and lower common denominator, much of television programming undercuts and even directly contradicts those values. Tough guys are sexier than nice guys; greed is more popular than generosity; humiliating someone is funnier than understanding them.

But I would like to point out that there are many kinds of "intelligence". Being good at abstract problem solving and conscious decision-making doesn't make you immune to emotional appeals and subconscious influences.

Which essentially was that Bushco created two major assumptons:
1.That to win the 'war' on terror, the U.S actually had to go to war.
2.That the #1 requirement of the person heading up the 'war' on terror is that they be "strong and resolute" (whatever that means).

Both of these assumptions were created long before Kerry became the Democratic nominee and they were endlessly parroted by the mindless and lazy U.S media, rather than debated and challenged.

We need look no further than the way Howard Dean was considered a 'far left loony liberal' just for opposing the Iraqi war, even though his political views in almost every area clearly placed him as a rather conservative Democrat as proof that the media parroted these assumptions.

All that said, and I appreciate the discussion, that isn't actually what I meant by this thread.

I was referring more to things like the discussion of the electoral reform idea "STV" here in British Columbia.

What seems to be the general attitude in the media is that STV is way too complicated for the average simpleton citizen to comprehend.

Is this really so? I think following STV requires an understanding of something like 3 or 4 mathematical formulas. If the average teenager can pick up on concepts in physics, is the average adult really too stupid to understand STV?

[ 09 December 2004: Message edited by: Adam T ]

Voters would be a lot more interested in the political process - and in the mechanics of any particular proposed reform - if a) someone who really understands is took the trouble to explain from the ground up and b) someone convinced them that it matters a damn what they think.

Americans are not any stupider than Canadians. And even a person of low IQ (I don't put much store by this; it's just a convenient shorthand reference to degrees of native intelligence.) can make a sound decision if properly informed.
There are several factors involved, besides mass communication media, but they're all related: all the strings can be traced to the same half dozen puppet-masters.

[ 10 December 2004: Message edited by: nonesuch ]