Re: what is the bronswick affair,did it really happen?

A quick google search gave me this page- http://library.webster.edu/ vidmedia.html: For many people, especially young viewers, TV is a major source of information and a frame of reference for interpreting experience and the world..."The Bronswick Affair" is a lively spoof of television journalism, exposing the excess of consumerism fostered by a steady stream of commercials...

I'm surprised your teacher wasn't more clear that the video was FALSE, though you could make a very good argument that television is and has always been dangerously manipulative of its audience, so it might be regarded as true in a very limited, metaphorical sense.

The fact is that people aren't rational, and will often do things and buy things that don't make sense if they interpret a television portrayal as being positive. People have been known to set themselves on fire, get killed lying down on highways, commit suicide, kill people, hijack planes, and, less obviously but much more commonly, buy things that are useless, if not harmful, because they hear about such things in the media. But since human behavior is very, very complicated and not well understood, we can't yet make very good scientific statements about how people react to complex stimuli. There have been studies that show that exposure to violent video games can make children exhibit violent behavior: http://www.apa.org/jo urnals/psp/psp784772.html.

Also people tend to imitate other people who appear successful or famous or cool, particularly children. But it's easy for people to ignore science and evidence and make unjustified claims about how television affects society based on personal feelings. It's very difficult to carefully investigate the facts and make an accurate assessment, and even more difficult to come up with a rigorous scientific approach to try and answer questions about the relationship between individual behavior and the media.

There have been cases where specific patterns of light on screens have triggered epileptic seizures in susceptible individuals (http://www.cdc.gov/od/hissb/docs/uisg-access.pdf), but no cases that I'm aware of that special technology was used to influence human behavior remotely in a controlled way. Because of the complexity of the brain and the way the brain works (completely different from things like computers and devices that are easy to control) it's pretty unlikely that mind-reading or technological brain-washing will occur anytime soon in reality. Continue to be skeptical of your teachers and your television and everyone else and learn for yourself the most reliable and consistent ways of determining truth. And there's still a whole lot more to learn about the human brain, and interesting tools like MRI and PET scanners and electrode measurements that are helping us understand how and why we think the way we do. Keep asking questions about how you think and how you're influenced by your environment.