Over 2,000 years ago, Plato described prisoners in a cave, shackled and forced to watch shadows on a wall, mistaking these illusions for reality. When one prisoner escapes and sees the real world, the truth is overwhelming. But when he returns to free the others, they reject him.
Now, swap the cave for a smartphone. The shadows for social media, curated feeds, and AI-driven content. Are we any different from Plato’s prisoners? We consume reality through screens, shaped by algorithms that decide what we see, think, and believe. Our attention is bought and sold, our perceptions manipulated.
If you were shown the "real world" beyond this digital illusion, free from biases, dopamine loops, and controlled narratives. Would you even believe it? Or would you, like Plato’s prisoners, reject the truth in favor of comforting shadows?
Are we still chained? Or is there a way out?
I’m not going to go as far back as classical antiquity, but I do think there has been a shift from 20^th^ corporate mass media to a 21^st^ century corporate algorithmic media.
No one can be free from biases. That is literally impossible, even nonsensical.
Again recycling my past response:
The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.
The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.
None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.
* I’ve criticized MBFC & Ad Fontes before:
You make some solid points about media and its role in shaping our perceptions. The shift from corporate mass media to algorithmic-driven content is massive, and while biases can never be fully escaped, the manipulation of those biases is more systematic now than ever.
Chomsky’s "5 Filters" and Bernays' work are key to understanding how this manipulation works.But the real question is.