The Plato’s cave we live in

 Have you ever thought about who it is who decides who decides what is important enough to put into a newspaper? On what basis does that person decide that this is something that the people will want to know and this isn’t?

Have you ever thought whether what you hear on TV or Radio really is true? Just because the whole of mainstream media is sticking with the same story, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be true…

If you start actually thinking of the way we gather information from the world around us, you may notice that there’s something fundamentally wrong about it. We never actually find out anything for sure, we just assume what we hear to be true, because it correlates what other sources are telling is. What that means is that we are the prisoners of Plato’s cave and the media is the system creating the shadows that represent what’s going on in the real world, on the wall of the cave.

That’s kind of concerning isn’t it? Especially if we live in a country where the government controls the media.

And think about the power that just one journalist has. By simply changing the way he uses the language, he can make the whole story seem different from what it really is and make people take the sides he wants them to take on the issue at hand.

What if someone wants us to stay ignorant about something going on? They could just fill the news with stories that aren’t actually the most important, but instead the kind of news he doesn’t mind you knowing.

This sounds like wild conspiracy theory, but think about it. It wouldn’t take too much to control an entire nation if someone was actually willing to. The Internet naturally makes it more difficult, since people can now spread information themselves, but the information those people can spread is just what their governments didn’t mind them knowing in the first place…

If you didn’t know anything about the Plato’s cave before you started reading this post, you may want to catch up on it. That way this post might actually make some sense to you. Assuming that it makes any sense in the first place, which is quite doubtful…