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context is fundamental.
i've been reading a bit about media priming today while avoiding other tasks that i had to do. the idea of media priming is pretty simple: repetition of visual associations between images of people and descriptions of "issues" no matter how simplistic, once repeated courtesy of your televisual apparatus, seem to impact upon the cognitive pathways that are access to memory. these associations also apparently influence how you feel about that flickering head and shape something of your position on the issue. the trick is that the less one knows about the issue--or about politics--the greater the influence. i have some depressing studies on this in my backpack and can put up a bunch of citations if you like so you can go read this particularly grim little area of infotainment infotainment--but even if you don't, you might wonder about the extent to which this sort of thing explains the relative closeness in the polls between the two presidential candidates at this the apparent end of the television-driven sporting event they laughingly call the "primary season" and the beginning of the new, playoff-round sporting event called the election season, which will culminate in the superbowl later in the fall.
this isn't subliminal messaging and it's not exactly conditioning (absence of the reward or punishment dimension)---no no, it's an effect of repetition.
repetition is power.
i don't think there's much hope of getting to anything remotely like a serious discussion of the topic broached in the op by way of the op, so will simply deposit this lovely little bit of cynicism-increasing science for you to consider. why *do* people believe as they believe anyway? repetition is power.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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