“Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live.” THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS by Walter Lippmann
How do Americans view people living half way around the world; a billion miles from the world that they know? But more importantly, if one has never experienced the unknown for themselves and with their own two eyes, how are our beliefs and thoughts formed? For everyone, it isn’t just one source or one person that helps to form these “pictures in our heads.” In Walter Lippmann’s, THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS, Lippmann remains us of a time when breaking news didn’t take more than five minutes to reach half the U.S population. A time when gossip didn’t spread through a school like wildfire; a world when people didn’t hear about life changing events for days, week, or even months. So in a time when one couldn’t Google pictures and maps of foreign lands and YouTube videos that had already been viewed by half a million people, Americans had to use whatever sources of information that they could get their hands onto. It didn’t matter what credentials they had or if what they were being told had any creditability, all that matter was that this information was helping them create an image in their minds of the things that were unfamiliar to them.
It may not be 1800 anymore and we may live in the era of technology, but just because we can get information far more quickly doesn’t mean that the info that we receive today, from which ever of the million possible sources, is better or more reliable than in 1800. Today people can chose from a countless number of sources and mediums that they want to get their news, facts from to develop those pictures in their minds.
“There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate.” AMERICA THE ILLITERATE by Chris Hedges
Who would have thought that America, the superpower of the world, would be the home of such an astonishing statistic? Chris Hedges argues that because of this fact Americans are being taken advantage of by the people that they are suppose to trust, the ones bringing them the news and the ones running their country as well. Do people know who they are getting their news from, the hidden agendas they have and how they might be trying to sway their opinion or even hide the truth? Because they cannot pick up a newspaper or book to read the facts for themselves, they need someone to read it for them and even interpret the meaning.
“Pictures in our Heads” – How do we develop these pictures, are they all different to each person? Who impacts the pictures we create? Are there wrong or right pictures, or can it just be how one person sees the world? Do people create these pictures through their eyes or through the things they read or hear?
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I totally agree with what you are saying and how the American population is been driven into thinking what is right rather than thinking for themselves.
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