Connections: Life, Knowledge, and Media

According to Dictionary.com, one of the many meanings of the word connection is as follows:

"Usually, connections. associates, relations, acquaintances, or friends, esp. representing or having some influence or power."

From the time we're born, we learn to have some sort of connections with other people, mainly parents and older siblings, at first. These relationships influence us to form the person we become in the future. As we grow up, we observe and learn different things from family, friends, school, media and etc, which are all ways we become socialized.

The article on connections: life, knowledge and media explains just that. In addition to breaking down the patterns of learning and socialization, while give us different theories of how we learn to be social and unlearn information that has been given to us through the various means of communications, as we come to notice that not everything that has been taught to us is always correct.

The article begins with the story of Christmas and how every means of communication, also including relatives and friends, promote the Christian holiday in grandness, but what about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa? The media barely promotes these holidays. How do you think they feel in December when everything is revolved around Christmas and the Christian faith. This really makes one realize that there are so many other cultures and belief systems out there, and that the majority doesn't always rule, yet the whole human race should come together and take a stand, particularly the media, there's not one culture that's more important than other. They are all important in there own way, especially to the individual culture.

A theory that I found interesting was the Liberation Theory. It basically states that not everything we have learned is correct information, rather its misinformation that can be unlearned. For example we can go most of our lives thinking that certain other cultures are bad, and we are influenced by these ideas not necessarily through our own experiences, but through the experiences of our family and peers, and through the portrayal the media gives other cultures that is not the predominate. Till one day we meet someone within that culture and we come to realize that they are not bad people at all. This process is getting the information that we once thought to be truthful and unlearned/altered our understandings and beliefs of other people.