Timeless Moments

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Prof. Dr. Andrea Gentile teaches Philosophy at Università Teologica Seraphicum and is Research Fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Bonn) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

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HUMAN MIND, MASS MEDIA AND IMAGES IN GADAMER AND HABERMAS. HOW MASS MEDIA CAN INFLUENCE THE HUMAN MIND AND HUMAN THINKING published in “Información Filosófica. Revista Internacional de Filosofía y Ciencias Humanas”, Volume III, n. 2, pp. 69-74, 2006.

Summary: In an interview published by «Die Woche» (10th February 1995), Hans Georg Gadamer declared that «television is the chain of slaves where modern humanity is tied. The contemporary élite of information own the key to this chain and its specific aim is to reduce humanity to slavery through images». According to this point of view, the political and social function of television is to «control» and «accustom» the human mind, human ideas and human capacity of judgement. From this perspective, Gadamer’s criticism is against the mass media «system» which threatens, through industry of communication and information, to transform democracy into oligarchy.

As in Gadamer, also in the sociological theory of Jürgen Habermas, the mass media are seen as being controlled by political and economic «forces», which have an interest in «manipulating» the audience. This compromises the legitimacy of the communicative power exercised by the mass media. The political manipulation is a kind of opinion making, where the media not only transmit debates, but also create and shape them. The commercial manipulation uses the carefully designed and tested psychological methods of advertising. The media explore themes and identification possibilities that appeal to the unconscious dispositions of the audience in order to attract attention.

Human «tragedy» in modern society is that our scientific-technological «automatisms» drive us too far from real and pure authenticity of feelings and emotions of the human being. Images and mass media systems determine passivity in the human mind and they do not develop experience, real motivations, spontaneity: they are not able to form creative and critical minds.

Keywords: Human Mind, Mass Media, Hans Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas

Subjects and specific contents of images proposed by mass media can be divided into two principal parts: reality and fiction, facts and fantasy. All kinds of programs are connected with this distinction, even if modern communication strategies of television can produce some programs where it is sometimes difficult to understand and maintain clear boundaries between reality and fiction.

Many times we can notice that images of violence seem to have a preference in the choice of news selected and presented by mass media information¹. The principle of “negativity” is expressed in a modern journalistic attitude: bad news is good news for the audience. Bad news is connected with a conflict or drama. Conflict produces a state of tension about the future. Drama involves the human mind and the public’s emotions with phenomena of identification, showing subjective, personal, human aspects of defeat, victory or tragedy². Images of violence in mass media are sometimes connected with competition. Public information decides to propose shock situations or strong images of violence to increase the audience. The specific choice of images of violence is caused by a principal reason which characterizes mass media. Television news programmes are by now a “spectacle”, as all other television programs are today a “spectacle” and they want to attract the highest possible audience. This simple fact explains the preference for news that contains action, human drama, conflicts and suggestive images able to excite deep, strong emotions and to involve the human mind.

Mass media images of publicity are also proposed from this kind of perspective. We can always find images of advertising and publicity that deal with fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. If on one side images of publicity exist in function of the market, efficiency and fashion, on the other side these images are used to convey the idea of success: they are proposed and publicized as «models»³ to appear with success. Mass media images of publicity sell objects, but also sell dreams, desires, feelings. They use whichever image does the best job to convince the highest number of people. These images are often solely concerned with appearance, and can be chosen without consideration for the negative feelings and emotions they may stimulate.

In an interview published by «Die Woche» (10th February 1995), Hans Georg Gadamer declared that «television is the chain of slaves where modern humanity is tied. The contemporary élite of information own the key to this chain and its specific aim is to reduce humanity to slavery through images».

Images proposed and publicized by television many times are against human dignity and do not promote real, deep and authentic motivations in human beings. According to this point of view, the political and social function of television is to “control” and “accustom” the human mind, human ideas, emotions, feelings and human capacity of judgement. From this perspective, Gadamer’s criticism is against the mass media “system” which threatens, through industry of communication and information, to transform democracy into oligarchy.

«A culture connected with real and deep education of our soul and our mind is now disappearing more and more in modern society. In this horizon, we have to outline the end of culture and of the experience of dialogue. With every day the end of the experience of dialogue causes the end of the forming of a critical mind»⁴.

In an other interview published by «L’Unità» (31st March 1996), Gadamer declared also that «in our mass media system there is no spontaneity and no creativity. Almost everyone is passive. The political function of television is to control human mind and to accustom human capacity of judgement and human thinking. This process is one of the forms of society bureaucracy defined by Max Weber».

Gadamer recognizes that in our society the forms of social bureaucracy are by now «inevitable». But human «tragedy» is that our modern scientific-technological «automatisms» of the internet⁵ and modern mass media drive us too far from pure authenticity of the human being, from authenticity and spontaneity of our feelings and emotions. Mass media do not develop experience, real motivations, spontaneity: they are not able to form creative and critical minds.

«Education systems in our modern society are characterized by a deep crisis. The reason is because we are losing the meaning of dialogue. Television is the opposite of dialogue: only one person speaks to millions of people who do not say anything. It is a system of slaves. I am against a closed system, I am against – says Gadamer – a system of slavery. I want to support human thinking and dialogue as forms against the manipulation of the audience»⁶.

In an article published by «Giornale di Sicilia» (10th March 1994), Massimiliano Cannata asked Gadamer some interesting questions about the connections between mass media, images, democracy and the human mind.

«Images and mass media systems – says Gadamer – determine passivity in the human mind. Democracy is a critical point. Democracy is by now a form of despotism and the new modern despotism is mass media despotism. My criticism is not against mass media operators, but against all the system which threatens to transform democracy into oligarchy, through the industry of communication and information. Freedom, critical mind and democracy are the most important points in our society»⁷.

As in Gadamer, also in the sociological theory of Jürgen Habermas, the mass media are seen as being controlled by political and economic «forces», which have an interest in «manipulating» the audience⁸. This compromises the legitimacy of the communicative power exercised by the mass media. The political manipulation is a kind of opinion making, where the media not only transmit debates, but also create and shape them. The commercial manipulation uses the carefully designed and tested psychological methods of advertising. The media explore themes and identification possibilities that appeal to the unconscious dispositions of the audience in order to attract attention.

The political scientist Peter Klier criticizes Habermas’ manipulation hypothesis because absolute objectivity does not exist. Klier thinks the amount of information in modern society is so huge that the media as well as citizens and politicians have to make a very strict selection. But what does «selection» mean? How can we define a «selection process» of the human mind?

Members of the public can neither grasp the many topics, nor penetrate sufficiently deep into a particular topic to fulfil the role that they are supposed to, according to the norms of democracy. Klier thinks this selection is such a big problem that no manipulation hypothesis is needed to conclude that democracy has a legitimacy problem. He stresses that people’s reality image is more determined by the media reality. The more they are dependent on selective media and the less their chances are of getting corrective information from primary sources. Klier advocates this obvious observation as a counter thesis to the manipulation hypothesis of Habermas. But this so-called counter thesis confirms the very fact that the media produce a skewed image of reality. We are only left with the question of whether this distortion deserves to be called manipulation.

From this perspective, in his social systems theory, Niklas Luhmann sees communication as a fundamental process in any social system. Communication forms a triple «selection process»⁹: 1. selection of information by the sender; 2. selective attention by the receiver; 3. the selecting effect of the received information. Communication is very much controlled by the media in modern society. Luhmann describes the mass media as a self-referential and self-maintaining (autopoietic), almost autonomous system.

There are many different scientific, cognitive theories about how mass media can influence the human mind, human thinking, as well as people’s attitudes, worldview and behaviour. While historical as well as contemporary observations are full of examples attesting to the power of the mass media to influence people, early experimental studies have failed to confirm the assumption that mass media have a strong power to change people’s attitudes.

This discrepancy between experiments and real world observations was solved with the introduction of theories of cognitive processing, such as agenda setting, framing and priming. The human cognitive capacities are limited. The news media contain huge amounts of information, much more than any person can possibly handle. It is therefore theorized that humans are economizing the processing of the information they receive from news media as well as from other sources.

The first step in handling information is selection. People choose which news media to read, watch, and listen to, according to their needs and preferences. They screen the media for interesting information, ignoring topics that appear to be irrelevant to them, redundant, boring, or too complicated to comprehend. People routinely reject stories that appear too remote or too complicated simply to save time and energy. Stories that catch people’s attention are those that are relevant to their personal interests, but also general human-interest stories such as reports about crimes and accidents, health, sports, entertainment, and celebrities.

The producers of news have learned to snare people’s attention by giving most stories a personal touch. Once a story has been selected for attention, the cognitive processing of the story is further economized by schematic thinking. Humans use what has been called knowledge structures or schemata (sing. schema) as mental templates that people and events are fitted into. This process facilitates the integration of new information into existing knowledge.

Since news sources usually present the news in isolated snippets without sufficient background, the schemata allow the receivers to embed the news into a meaningful context. This process also facilitates discarding redundant information that already exists in the schema as well as information that conflicts with previous knowledge that still appears to be sound. People often misunderstand stories, either because they do not have an appropriate schema to interpret the story, or because they apply the schema that comes first to mind rather than the schema that is most appropriate. Well-informed people have a rich collection of schemata that makes it easier to process new information.

The effect of agenda-setting is epitomized in the famous quote by Bernard Cohen, saying that the press «may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about». People need to orient themselves in a complex world full of complex issues. In the absence of other cues, people tend to judge the importance of issues from their salience in the media and to focus their attention on those presumably most important issues. There is plenty of evidence that the media have strong influence on people’s perception of which issues are important and which problems they want their government to do something about.

Another cognitive effect in our mind, which may be explained as a consequence of schematic thinking, is framing. Framing refers to the frame of reference within which an issue is described. As every story must have a frame, whether the journalist pays attention to framing or not, we cannot assume that the effects of framing are always intentional.

Several theorists make a distinction between frames in the media and frames in the minds of the audience¹⁰. A media frame is a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events. Audience frames are defined as mentally stored clusters of ideas that guide individuals’ processing of information.

Following all these considerations, we can notice that a lot of images proposed by mass media can influence the human mind, human thinking, as well as people’s attitudes, worldview and behaviour. Images proposed and publicized by mass media and the internet many times are against human dignity and do not promote spontaneity and real, deep and authentic motivations in human beings.

If we stop and believe only in the appearance of images and we never try to go beyond these limits, our mind will always be a prisoner of material and external aspects of our life and we will never find those interior values which could give a sense to our own life. In order to search and give a deep sense to our life, we should return to real authenticity of philosophy, following Socrates’ teachings. Going against a life dominated by the appearance and the power of images, we should try to look inside our own interiority, try to discover and to know ourselves. Moving from this perspective, we can be ourselves and express our authentic nature and personality, according to a personal experience of life and a critical knowledge of reality.

© Andrea Gentile 2009 – andreagentile.ag@libero.it

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Human mind, mass media and images in Gadamer and Habermas. How mass media can influence the human mind and human thinking

He has also written several books

Che cosa significa orientarsi nel pensare? (1996)

Victor Hugo. Un uomo, la legge e la giustizia (1996)

The Notion of «Limit» in Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy (1999)

Storia della filosofia dal Quattrocento al Settecento (1999)

L’arte di educare (2001); Ai confini della ragione (2003)

Le ipotesi della ragione e i limiti della conoscenza. «Possibilità ipotetica»,«induzione», «analogia», «riflessione» e «astrazione» nella Logica di Kant (2007)

Formazione, università e ricerca in Europa, America, Asia, Africa e Oceania. Riforme, progetti innovativi e sistemi a confronto nei cinque continenti (2008).