Plato and the TV
If you have been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you are really lucky. If not, and you follow mass media (digital, print and social) like myself, you must have formed some opinion regarding the current affairs in polity, economics or entertainment.
Taking a stand is always associated with un-quantifiable and absurd virtues like courage, strong leadership and some other skills which you think can help you clear an interview. But when it comes to media today, rather than being opinionated, one should question the veracity of what is being shown.
This post, focuses on the news provided by the digital media; Basically just TV plus the numerous videos of the TV shows on social media.
At this point, it is important for the reader to understand Plato's Allegory of the cave. But before that, some important points to remember about Plato are that:
1. His ideas pertain 2400 years before this post.
2. He lived in a society where oligarchy and democracy were fighting for Athenian supremacy.
3. Plato was anti-democracy and anti-oligarchy. He believed people who knew their stuff, like
history, mathematics, economics et al., should rule. He called them philosophical kings and
queens.
4. He was in favor of a technocratic dictatorship, mostly because his beloved teacher, Socrates, was
killed by democrats and he became a recluse after that for some time.
Allegory of the cave:
Imagine a cave with a single opening. Prisoners are chained, with their backs facing the opening. They can't move in any direction. Some objects like, animals , musicians carts move in front of the cave and the prisoners see their shadows. One fine day, a prisoner is freed. He gets out, sees the world, realizes that all that previously seen by him were mere images, comes back to his friends in the cave, and tells them his findings. His fellow prisoners don't believe him and discard him.
Here is a Ted-Ed video with things put nicely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA
Here comes the TV
A regular person who comes home tired from his day's work is in no mood of thinking. He turns on the TV, to get some updates and imbibes what is being shown without thinking. This is perfectly fine in today's world. In Plato's time, he was called an idiotes--a person who lacks the knowledge and social skills that mature individuals can be expected to posses.
The TV here represents the world outside the cave in the allegory. The viewers are the (mentally) chained prisoners with their backs against the light. People spend their time as hypnotized consumers of an endless stream of moving images and manipulative sounds. Most viewers are in no position to check what they receive from the screen against the facts of the real world. The world in which they live emotionally and cognitively is a television world, a world produced and explained by strongly manipulative information and entertainment industries. Like Plato’s chained prisoners, viewers rarely even wonder whether what they see and think corresponds to reality or not. To a large extent they simply take what they see to be the world. Brainwashed.
The problem with this allegory is that, Plato doesn't provide a solution to this problem. He takes this as life and claims that people get on with it, more like Camus's existentialism. The technocrats or the highly educated fellas are the ones who get out of the cave and try to educate the prisoners. Whether they fail or succeed, is not elaborated.
The sad reality in today's time is that we don't know who has gone out of the cave to experience reality. Leave aside failure and success of the educated. We don't know who is preaching the truth or who is showing the shadows. Most of the digital media is controlled by the few privileged and it is next to impossible to enlighten the masses, that is, to free them from their "false consciousness". Social media, particularly twitter had made some huge headway in spreading awareness and sharing the ground reality, as we have seen with the Arab revolution. But that too has failed in recent times with PR agencies hiring accounts, popularly called bhakts.
It is not that consumers have not been aware of this. Numerous intellectuals have tried to move them away from paid media to ethically and morally right ones. But these are again absurd virtues and the entire allegory repeats itself in an infinite circle till one becomes a happy fool and not a know-it-all.
Taking a stand is always associated with un-quantifiable and absurd virtues like courage, strong leadership and some other skills which you think can help you clear an interview. But when it comes to media today, rather than being opinionated, one should question the veracity of what is being shown.
This post, focuses on the news provided by the digital media; Basically just TV plus the numerous videos of the TV shows on social media.
At this point, it is important for the reader to understand Plato's Allegory of the cave. But before that, some important points to remember about Plato are that:
1. His ideas pertain 2400 years before this post.
2. He lived in a society where oligarchy and democracy were fighting for Athenian supremacy.
3. Plato was anti-democracy and anti-oligarchy. He believed people who knew their stuff, like
history, mathematics, economics et al., should rule. He called them philosophical kings and
queens.
4. He was in favor of a technocratic dictatorship, mostly because his beloved teacher, Socrates, was
killed by democrats and he became a recluse after that for some time.
Allegory of the cave:
Imagine a cave with a single opening. Prisoners are chained, with their backs facing the opening. They can't move in any direction. Some objects like, animals , musicians carts move in front of the cave and the prisoners see their shadows. One fine day, a prisoner is freed. He gets out, sees the world, realizes that all that previously seen by him were mere images, comes back to his friends in the cave, and tells them his findings. His fellow prisoners don't believe him and discard him.
Here is a Ted-Ed video with things put nicely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA
Here comes the TV
A regular person who comes home tired from his day's work is in no mood of thinking. He turns on the TV, to get some updates and imbibes what is being shown without thinking. This is perfectly fine in today's world. In Plato's time, he was called an idiotes--a person who lacks the knowledge and social skills that mature individuals can be expected to posses.
The TV here represents the world outside the cave in the allegory. The viewers are the (mentally) chained prisoners with their backs against the light. People spend their time as hypnotized consumers of an endless stream of moving images and manipulative sounds. Most viewers are in no position to check what they receive from the screen against the facts of the real world. The world in which they live emotionally and cognitively is a television world, a world produced and explained by strongly manipulative information and entertainment industries. Like Plato’s chained prisoners, viewers rarely even wonder whether what they see and think corresponds to reality or not. To a large extent they simply take what they see to be the world. Brainwashed.
The problem with this allegory is that, Plato doesn't provide a solution to this problem. He takes this as life and claims that people get on with it, more like Camus's existentialism. The technocrats or the highly educated fellas are the ones who get out of the cave and try to educate the prisoners. Whether they fail or succeed, is not elaborated.
The sad reality in today's time is that we don't know who has gone out of the cave to experience reality. Leave aside failure and success of the educated. We don't know who is preaching the truth or who is showing the shadows. Most of the digital media is controlled by the few privileged and it is next to impossible to enlighten the masses, that is, to free them from their "false consciousness". Social media, particularly twitter had made some huge headway in spreading awareness and sharing the ground reality, as we have seen with the Arab revolution. But that too has failed in recent times with PR agencies hiring accounts, popularly called bhakts.
It is not that consumers have not been aware of this. Numerous intellectuals have tried to move them away from paid media to ethically and morally right ones. But these are again absurd virtues and the entire allegory repeats itself in an infinite circle till one becomes a happy fool and not a know-it-all.
You, dear friend, have hit the nail on its head here.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback!
DeleteYou, dear friend, have hit the nail on its head here.
ReplyDeleteWell written. Penned my exact thoughts ! Somewhere in the past decade or two, i believe we have lost our measure of intrinsic value. Perhaps it might be better to be uninformed than misinformed.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback!
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