In "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato, there are prisoners who are tied down in a cave facing only a wall with shadows. The shadows act as a sort of television to the prisoners in which they watch shadows on the wall. Plato then states, "Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects." It is my understanding that the prisoners, having only ever seen the shadows on the wall, believe that the shadows are the objects in reality.
This mirrors how media is at the moment. Specifically during our recent election, information given to us through television and internet news sites were particularly prone to be not as they appeared. We may have been easily swayed by convincing pictures and words and have believed false information to be fact. If it looks like the "real" thing, then it must be, right?
Plato poses the question, "if then they were able to talk to one another, do you not think that they would suppose that in naming the things that they saw they were naming the passing objects?" The prisoners only saw shadows of the actual object, so if they named the shadow, for example a shoe, because it looked like a shoe, they were really naming the shadow and not the actual object. They cannot see the actual item because they are forced to only stare at the wall and cannot turn their heads. This is much like the influence that the media has over us. We want to know the truth and we want to know what is really happening in the world but our heads don't turn. We see the fantasy of the world on television and on websites all the time and we don't turn our heads to reality. Are we being forced to look straight ahead? I'm not sure, but it does seem like at times we take what we can get from news without question.
No comments:
Post a Comment