Social Media Brainwash: The tale of “A Beautiful Mind” and “newspaper wall" enforced by Social media news

 

 “A Beautiful Mind” is a film based on the life of mathematician John Nash, who won a Noble Prize for his work in the field of the theory of games. Although the narrative of this film revolves around the mental state of John Nash and explores the case of Schizophrenia, however a part of his life can be compared with the present mental state of a normal human being (Ross 2015 ).

 

The role of Newspaper wall influencing an insane behavior

The character of the Mathematician John Nash was played by Russell Crow. The narrative of the film unfolds itself with the help of a “Newspaper Wall.”  This wall in the film shows thousands of newspaper cuttings tucked in a scattered fashion. As the story progresses we discover that this wall was developed by John Nash under a false pretext that he is working for the FBI and encrypting the code messages of Russian spies from the newspaper cutting s (Tunzelmann 2017).

News Paper wall created by John Nash, As depicted in the film " A beautiful Mind" 

Social media news as an agent to empower an imaginary world

Towards the end of the film, the narrative reveals that John Nash is living in an imaginary world where he is encrypting simple news articles into deadly messages. In order to encrypt these messages he searches for a pattern in the messages and connects the missing dots by applying a connection and purpose among distinctive news pieces.

Social Media News is restricting our view and feeding a set of news articles again and again, this hammering is killing our objectivity and restricting the world view. 

Now consider the position of your brain while dealing with the onslaught of the half- baked news pieces shared on the walls of social media.  Rethink about the impressions that are you are making on the basis of these news pieces. Just like John Nash, you will also find yourself standing inside a room filled with random news articles. Unknowingly you may start to figure out the encrypted message or the intentions behind these news articles. You are not aware of the fact that these news articles are not random. Most of them are presenting a “selective reality” in front of you. All of it is happening because of IT technology and “Big Data mechanisms (Sumner 2020).”

You may be a victim exposed to selective reality or blocked vision

In this case the clause of selective reality forces you to employee your imagination to fill in the blank. For instance we can take an example from the recent Kisan Rally that took place on republic day of India. A senior journalist of India Mr. Rajdeep Sardesai, tweeted following message.

 

Tweet Posted by Rajdeep Sardesai, on the fateful day, please check it for the instigation of  a call for action when it says " The sacrifice will not go in vein." 

This tweet was partially true, a tractor driver died, during the protest, however, it was not because of the police firing, as stated by Mr. Rajdeep Sardesai. 

Rajdeep Sardesai, 

It happened because the driver tried to pull off a stunt on the tractor.  This is how perceptive news works, senior journalist flashes news on social media, this news becomes viral, people react to it on the basis of a perception. When you will look at the video of this accident, you will find that it seems from a distance that someone has shot a fire at the tractor driver, however, when we observe it closely we find that it happened because he lost the control over the steering wheel.

The actual visual of the Tractor accident, no bullets were found inside the body of the driver to establish the angle of murder of culpable homicide 

Restricted Reality can create an alternative version of truth

As a reader we are lucky that clarifications for this news came out within the nick of time. However, think about thousands of other such pieces of news which depicts a “restricted reality” by hiding certain facts. Most of these publishers never bother to clarify false reporting because they don’t exist for a longer period of time. Social media is a place where you can find thousands of new web pages making a “miss and blink” appearance, most of them prefers to shut their shops after a time because they only want to skim the market  (Andre Oblor 2013).

Possess a beautiful mind instead of a polluted mind

 Expand your imagination further and imagine yourself standing in a room similar to the “news wall room” where John Nash in “A beautiful mind” was encrypting the messages. John Nash was mentally sick he was living in a perceptive world, where his false imagination was guiding. It can be considered as insanity (ATL 2018).

 

The sinful mechanism behind SEO exercise

However, you are a sane person; now rethink about the SEO machinery throwing away similar types of messages again and again. Yes, it is true; search engines are blocking the real or the versatile picture c by covering many other aspects of news. Every time you search for anything on internet, big data machinery associated with the search engines captures of digital footprints and prepares a report which shows your interest areas. Later, on search engines restricts your world view and sent across some messages which you want to see of reconfirm to please your senses. Now the resultant of these perception may be favorable, however, on most of the occasions, these perceptions clubbed together with the onslaught of the selective supply forced by big data results, keeps you away from the literature that can help you in developing a rebuttal about the issue.

This repeated hammering of similar type of content often, force a person to become a victim of pre-conceived notion. The arrival of this state of the formation of pre-conceived notions completes the cycle of a sophisticated brain wash and converts you into a perceptive creature living on the staple food of news articles supplied by a particular section of the social media.

 

 

Bibliography

Andre Oblor, Kristopher Welsh. "The danger of Big Data: Social Media as a computational Social Science ." First Monday , 2013: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/3993/3269#author.

ATL, VOX. "YOU’RE LETTING STRANGERS BRAINWASH YOU: THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS [OPINION]." VOX ATL , 2018: https://voxatl.org/social-media-influencers-brainwash-opinion/.

Ross, Jane. "John Nash, Mathematician Who Inspired "A Beautiful Mind", Killed in Car Crash." Scientific American, Reuters , 2015 : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/john-nash-mathematician-who-inspired-a-beautiful-mind-killed-in-car-crash/.

Sumner, Stephen. "Social Media Is Brainwashing Us - Here's 5 Ways How." Associate Passle , 2020: https://digital-leadership-associates.passle.net/post/102fx06/social-media-is-brainwashing-us-heres-5-ways-how.

Tunzelmann, Alex Von. "A Beautiful Mind hides ugly truths." The Guardian , 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/dec/19/a-beautiful-mind-john-nash.