Mean World Syndrome: A Social Study

Malcolm X once said “The media 's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that 's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” The media reaches out to all places and affects everyone. It changes how we think and what we do. In the novel White Noise, Don Delillo uses Babette’s moral ambiguity, conveyed through her decisions and actions, to reveal the influence that media has on the internal conflict between one’s self interest and morality.

The presence of violence in our society has become commonplace as the media is filled with it. From our favorite television shows, video games and even the news, violence is made available to us at the click of a button. This ubiquitous presence that violence seems to have over our society has increased the discussion of whether violent content makes the viewer violent. Through The Mean World Syndrome shows that violent content doesn’t necessarily lead to aggressive behavior but might even make the viewer afraid of the world they live in. So how does mean world syndrome theory tie in with other leading thoughts on violence such as the bandwagon, cultivation theory, priming, framing, and catharsis.

Repititions and short sentences strengthen the message of the text. Repititions of the phrase ‘No hope’ reaches its crescendo at the end of the sentence. The choice of stylistic features evokes and increases the feeling of hopelessness. According to Broeren et al. (2011), any iterated negative thought, for instance worrying about your health or economic problems, will spark the release of detrimental neurochemicals.

In the reading there is a photo shot by photographer Arthur Felig of a group of children and two adults looking on to the scene of a murder in the streets of New York. The children push, shove and smile in an attempt to see the presumed body out of frame. They are in contrast to the two adult women in frame who are both in anguish. One lady cries with her eyes closed while the other looks down to avert her gaze from the scene. It latter goes on to refer to the second lady’s downward gaze as an adult practice to not look at “something awful” (page 11). I find the stark contrast between the two groups of adults and children to be very compelling toward the idea that humans have been sensitized, or unaccustomed to the sight of death. I am not

Often people find themselves captivated by the small, fabricated details in a story and that tends to make it difficult to decipher the actual meaning behind the story. In Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” this is the case as he demonstrates the influence of storytellers’ tone and the mood they create on people’s understanding of a moral in a story. By the same token, in Malcom Gladwell’s “Power of Context” and Karen Ho’s “Biographies of Hegemony,” the two authors explain the ideology of social determinism and its power over people’s perception of the truth. The power of inducements play a big role in the way people are able to understand reality. The complexity of the truth can often alter the way people perceive things because there are so many different meanings that people interpret from the context of stories and situations. There are certain qualities of context such as inducing words and a plethora of meanings that obscure the true actualities, making truth very complicated.

At first, the Ripper murders were a source of fascination to the public of Whitechapel and even more so in the rest of London. In her book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders found crime and murder can be a form of entertainment for people. She says, “Crime, especially murder, is very pleasant to think about in the abstract…It reinforces a sense of safety, even of pleasure, to know that murder is possible, just not here.” Those who were at a distance from the crimes lapped up the news reports like serials of fiction; their pleasure greater because the horrible stories were real. In Whitechapel, citizens visited the sites of the murders out of curiosity. The crime scenes became exhibits, and sometimes they returned to and retraced the path of blood the Ripper spilt. At first, it was a game to the public—a form of entertainment. Some members of the public attended victims’ funerals or traveled in groups seeking out the Ripper. Later, these groups became mobs on the hunt for the killer the police were unable to catch.

One of the earliest idioms taught to students of all ages is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Oftentimes, a quote like that can easily be disregarded, however, it is applicable to people who aren’t always who they seem to be. Shakespeare’s play the Merchant of Venice is an outstanding work that contains a very strange villain in Shylock, who is hated by all, although he has not wronged them in the past. Thusly, his habits and personality evolved from his interactions with the Venetian populous. By examining the changes Shylock displays in tone, Shylock the villain’s motivations can be seen and ultimately display that no matter how twisted a person is or may seem, the motivations behind their actions indicate that innately they have a

The play revolves around three main character’s Ian, Cate and the Soldier in a hotel room in Leeds. To summarise; “Ian and Cate meet in a hotel room some years after their relationship has ended. Ian makes various attempts to cajole then, it is implied to force Cate to have sex with him. A bomb goes off and destroys part of the room. Ian becomes the victim as a Soldier re-enacts war crimes perpetrated on his girlfriend, who was subsequently killed. The Soldier shoots himself. Blinded, hungry and alone, Ian makes…attempt to find relief. Cate has left the hotel in search for food and as the play ends, returns with provisions…she shares with a finally grateful

The play starts with a citizen and his wife disturbing the play “ A London Merchant”. They complain about how they want to see a new kind of play where middle class citizens are not misrepresented. The wife suggests for there to be a grocer in the play that kills a lion with a pestle. The citizen also suggests that his apprentice, Rafe, play this character. This new play takes place in the interrupted play of A London Merchant, where Jasper is in love with his master’s daughter, Luce. Luce also likes Jasper but she arranged to with Humphrey, a man who is pretentious and false, by her father. In order to be able to stay with Jasper she sets up a trap for Humphrey. She tells him that in order to win her heart, a man would have to have the guts to run away with her and elope. Knowing that Humphrey would tell her father and her father would have no objections, she would ditch Humphrey and run away with Jasper. When Jasper seeks help from his mother, Mrs. Merrythought, he is rejected because she favors his brother Michael. The mother decided to leave her husband, a drunk and partier, with nothing but Michael and jewels, but along the way she looses the jewelry in the forest. Around the same time, Jasper and Luce take their plan into action. Jasper knocked out Humphrey and runs a way with Luce. Jasper ends up finding the jewelry his mother had lost. Rafe, the grocer takes it upon himself to aid the damsel in distress, Mrs. Merrythought. The citizen and his wife demand that Rafe have more Chivalric and exotic adventures so Rafe goes on to rescue patients from an evil Barber named Barbaroso. He even goes on to travel to Moldavia, where the princess falls in love with him. Back in Jaspers story, things don’t go as planned. The merchant and Humphrey catch them. Luce is taken back and is locked in her room. Jasper feigns his death and manages to free Luce by

The play is written as a two hander the story unfolding from the two characters and every event is told to the audience through humour to keep the audience interested. Frank has got a drinking problem and Rita wants to be someone other than herself.

The play revolves around three main character’s Ian, Cate and the Soldier in a hotel room in Leeds. To summarise; “Ian and Cate meet in a hotel room some years after their relationship has ended. Ian makes various attempts to cajole then, it is implied to force Cate to have sex with him. A bomb goes off and destroys part of the room. Ian becomes the victim as a Soldier re-enacts war crimes perpetrated on his girlfriend, who was subsequently killed. The Soldier shoots himself. Blinded, hungry and alone, Ian makes…attempt to find relief. Cate has left the hotel in search for food and as the play ends, returns with provisions…she shares with a finally grateful

The play begins with a Nurse giving us a brief synopsis of the events leading up to the current time, like Medea falling in love with Jason,

Intervening on the subjective positions of the characters, shifted assumptions that the audience may have preconceived. It also de-centred the text as the power and

In other words, mass media play a major role in influencing People thinking through rhetorical discourse like sensationalism evoking a reaction from its viewership. For one thing, speeches, no longer have the effectiveness to convince people. Furthermore, the public opinions vary when it comes to biases, politics, and economics because they've heard only one side of the evidence that’s has been reported. To put it differently, rhetorical concepts have been conditioning the viewer’s perceptions with sound bites, imagery, and tone of languages naming some of the rhetorical devices of many. However, the mind can be complicated in deciphering the writer’s intention through mediums. When this happens, it’s called aberrant decoding a person takes on a meaning and subverts the message into its own understanding.

The way in which Forster alerts the reader to the fact that Dolly has been physically attacked is cunningly subtle: the word 'bloody' is mentioned in a quiet subclause among a barrage of detail, and the incident is not alluded to afterwards. This partial obscuring of the truth is perhaps in itself a satirical look at the superficiality of public-school mentality, while the comment that