Against Nothingness

Karen E. Dill.  How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence . Oxford University Press, 2009. 320 pgs.  This is a book about the massive impact that TV, Movies, Video Games, and Music has on all of us, whether we know it or not.  Karen Dill begins by explaining the psychology of media. Most importantly, she shows that it does affect us, despite the fact that most people believe they are immune. This is called the "third person effect."  The 'third person effect' is the phenomenon that almost all people believe that other people  are influenced and affected by media exposure, but they personally are not. Clearly, this is logically impossible and nonsense, but we convince ourselves anyway.  With this established, Dill spends a chapter each exploring the following issues, relating serious scholarly studies in each instance: media violence, race and gender, social learning (focused on beauty and domestic violence), advertising a...

It took a lot of convincing for me to join facebook.  Since then, I have maintained my skepticism, as noted by my earlier reference to several articles  on the subject.  I remember reading about facebook's change of term's back in February of 2009. This was a position which quickly engendered various degrees of outrage, prompting 20-some-thousand people to join protest groups on facebook (Oh, the irony), among other responses. It took less than a week for facebook to back down.    Of course, you still give facebook permission to use anything you post, including the keeping of data for "a reasonable period of time" after you delete it or delete your account... whatever that means.  So far, it seems they just don't delete content .  None of that is news.  Facebook is out to make money.  Integral to their ability to do so is the use of personal information from users.  Shocking, I know.  Aritcles like "The Future of Sell...