The World Outside and Pictures in Our Heads
The introductory first part describes man’s inability to functionally perceive and accurately interpret the world: “The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance”, between people and their environment (reality). That people construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world; therefore, to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. Hence, people “live in the same world, but think and feel in different ones”. Human behavior is stimulated by the person’s pseudo-environment and then is acted upon in the real world. The chapter highlights some of the general implications of the interactions among one’s psychology, environment, and the mass communications media.
Read more about this topic: Public Opinion (book)
Famous quotes containing the words world, pictures and/or heads:
“A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)