Posted on 10/24/2008 12:33:20 PM PDT by MHGinTN
BTW, do you really believe that the little box, the goblin fire in people's living rooms and bedrooms does not fashion public perception and public opinion? ... Right, you'll get lots of agreement with that one!
No n00bie is not an affection term, anywhere. Anything pointing to the recentness of a person’s account date is an insult. I’ll accept that you didn’t mean it that way, but really it’s an insult.
I didn’t say the box doesn’t shape opinion. I’m simply pointing out the difference in standard human reaction to a faced person (in this case fictional) and many faceless people (in this case real). The box can’t change this simple human reaction, our brain is geared towards being part of familial units and dealing with the kinds of problem familial units have. Subsequently it handles small numbers and personal connections very well, and it doesn’t handle large numbers and impersonal connections well if at all.
For most people any number that’s over 100 (for some it’s as low as 50, others can push it as high as 1000) is basically imaginary. We can’t internalize it, we deal with 1, a couple, a handful, and a couple of handfuls, and everything past that is basically outside our brain. So when you start talking about millions of aborted babies it’s a fog number, most people can’t understand it, and in one of those wierd tricks of the brain most treat it the same as they would hundreds. It’s over 100 and therefore not internalized. TV can’t change this. Millions of aborted babies, no matter how it gets handled on TV will remain a faceless incomprehensible number to the vast majority of people.
TV can change a lot, unfortunately basic limitations of the human mind doesn’t seem to be on the list.
From #20: "I simply pointed out why people are more able to identify with TV characters they see than real people they don’t. ... I don’t think the TV venue could change any of that. You still have the basic that abortion kids are “faceless” to the masses and won’t generate empathy. They are real human being but they don’t FEEL real to most people, and ni this case it’s the feeling that matter."
From #22: "I didn’t say the box doesn’t shape opinion. I’m simply pointing out the difference in standard human reaction to a faced person (in this case fictional) and many faceless people (in this case real). The box can’t change this simple human reaction, our brain is geared towards being part of familial units and dealing with the kinds of problem familial units have."
You’re missing the scope of “change any of that” in post 20. Can the TV change opinions? Yes. Can the TV change basic human nature? No. People’s lack of identification with large number os faceless people is part of basic human nature, not opinion.
LOL!
I hear ya. If it wasn't for football I would not ever view ABCCBSNBCFOX.
Yep, you can easily guage the mental state of the masses by popular “entertainment”.
Good, except I’m not even crazy about the lead guy (see, I can’t remember his name—I find him pompous and annoying). Of course, I’m even getting tired of House. No one can possibly be that bitter and compassionless all the time. Of course if the lesbian love scenes continue I’ll have to quit watching that anyway.
To be honest, while I’ve never seen that specific episode of CSI, I find CSI to be pretty tame and impossible to take seriously. However, I love the characters and writing for Bones, and it’s a bit more graphic and noticeably more realistic. But, I’ve probably been massively desensitized to all this, cause what I see in my forensics class is stuff that nobody could get away with putting on TV. In a similar way, people get killed in nasty ways all the time in real life - you’d probably be shocked at some of what happens in even ‘quiet, boring’ communities.
I was trying to draw the connection to the character of the little boy in the episode suffocating slowly and the suffocation killing of born alive infants Obama sought to disenfranchise in order to protect that method of killing the little ones. I suspect one or two posters didn’t like the connection because it was a negative for their obamessiah, so they played diversion from the connection.
I just went with “What has America become?” (I very rarely watch TV anymore. Most of the talk about the tube is now Greek).
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