Comment by somenameforme

Comment by somenameforme 4 days ago

The whole concept that one's views can be changed by what they were compelled to watch is what leads to the circus of absurdity in modern times. The fact that the media, corporations, and political establishment will all aggressively repeat a statement only to be rebuffed by the public at large seems to have no affect on their insistence on believing in this nonsense.

If it were true than the countless nations which turned to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain themselves would be still standing. Instead, they invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop believing anything (or supporting their own government) and at that point their collapse is already imminent - even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet Union.

Or for some predictive power - once China's economy reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the books and redefine exactly how things are measured just to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their entire political system will collapse. People would be happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day, so long as their economy and society was booming from the average person's perspective. It's only when things slow down that people start looking more critically at the systems they live under.

forgotoldacc 4 days ago

A large part of the effectiveness of the media is normal people think they don't know this.

Media has absolutely wised up to the fact that contrarian attitudes are common amongst Americans. These companies know that if they repeat something nonstop and make it as obnoxious as possible, a large number of people will quickly adopt the opposite viewpoint. That's the desired result.

Reverse psychology is something elementary school kids learn about and use to torment others or do their bidding. It doesn't end in elementary school.

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somenameforme 3 days ago

This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0 propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US political establishment. It's certainly not some secret 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-establishment types.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.

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- forgotoldacc 3 days ago
  
  It's not even 5D chess.
  They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
  It's very transparent.
  A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
  Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
  If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
  
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  lmm 3 days ago
  
  > If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
  It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
  Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
  
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  somenameforme 3 days ago
  
  The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full ideological has led to a polarization in society (or perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has happened) and this has gradually led to people believing in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals want to have children reading gay literature and defund the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some sort of white Christian ethnostate.
  Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.
  
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quesera 4 days ago

I have no idea how you can believe that media does not affect a person's beliefs.

The evidence is all around you.

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somenameforme 3 days ago

You miss the direction of causality. People, especially in modern times, are attracted to media that 'identifies' with their worldview. So you end up with a viewership that matches the ideology of the medium. But it's not because the medium 'converted' anybody.
Or consider things like the USSR where the government strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite jokes from the time is, "Why do we have two newspapers, "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And indeed once they started allowing some degree of expression, it was basically all anti-establishment, leading to some notably great Soviet music from the 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.
I do think media can have an influence on things people know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk. War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever about the conflict. But then over time people begin to learn more and formulate their own views and learn more about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.
And in cases where people already have preformed opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The obvious example in recent times would be the media effort to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they already had their opinions and so the media propaganda was mostly completely ineffective.

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- quesera 3 days ago
  
  I don't miss the causality at all. I think you greatly overestimate people's willingness to critically examine ideas that are surfaced within their affinity group.
  Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it. And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a product of their developmental environment to begin with.
  Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework for thought is provided to them by the group. These groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely, defined. There is always a fringe. But independent thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of people.
  This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can you?
  
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  somenameforme 3 days ago
  
  Again there are obvious and mostly endless counter-examples to this. A couple of examples from both sides of the aisle - when Fox News fired Tucker Carslon, their ratings plummeted and he ended up getting [far] more viewers on X than FoxNews gets during prime time broadcasts! When the NYTimes published an editorial from Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that the George Floyd riots and violence should be brought to an end by deploying of the military, their readers freaked out to the point that the director of editorials was "retired", and they publicly announced they would be rethinking about what they publish.
  People pick their worldview and biases, and media (in current times) sees it as their role to deliver on those biases. When they don't - the audience leaves and moves on to somebody who will.
  The only real superpower media has is to overtly lie to people. And on issues that people know nothing about it is generally effective. But as they learn more about the topic, the views shift more towards what people again choose to individually think about an issue. And as a longer term side effect of this, this superpower is completely self defeating because people begin to completely distrust the media. I could show polls on that but I'm sure you already know trust in media is basically nonexistent. The funnier one is this. [1] The perceived ethics of journalists lies literally right between lawyers and advertisers.
  [1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/467804/nurses-retain-top-ethics...
  
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scarecrowbob 4 days ago

I don't think anyone doesn't believe media impacts how people think.
I do think that you have toan incredibly reductive view of belief formation to think that simply showing someone a series of short videos is enough to change how they think about the world.
There's a whole dialect in our existence within language, but most folks I know think that they are the sole authors of their beliefs while other folks are entirely a product of whatever happens to be in front of them. It's very reminiscent of the Fundamental Attribution fallacy...

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- quesera 3 days ago
  
  Well-executed propaganda does not need to attempt direct change in thought.
  It sows ideas that are net-beneficial to the propagandist. Leans into the ones that get traction. Manipulates the conversation. Provides simplistic (but advantageous) refutations of more complex (but more true) criticisms.
  This is Psych 101 material here. Not at all complicated. You just need to think on a wider horizon and a longer time frame. Stereotypically, this is a cultural weakness of US Americans. Certainly of its leaders. Other cultures have contrasting reputations, some of which appears to be earned.
  
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