Mass Over Mass Media By Steven Pinker

The article “Mass Over Mass Media” is written by Steven Pinker. Pinker is a professor at Harvard University who teaches in the Psychology department and focuses on visual cognition which is the information interpreted visually by the brain, and psychology in language. Visual Cognition is the study of the brain that explains the way the brain interprets and understands foreign language and objects in a visual way. When the brain obtains information visually, it processes this information by translating it to a language it can understand. When the eyes sense an object, the brain immediately recognizes the object and organizes the information into a form that can be understood and interpreted. This process is controlled the brain and helps humans
He makes a point about how we have had so many forms of media yet discoveries and technology have only gotten better and better. With the help of technology advancing scientists are currently able to expand discoveries, introducing new findings. He makes a point that if electronic media were so bad, then discoveries in science would be declining instead of having shooting up at a rate that we can’t even keep up with. He also goes on to state that many other fields like, philosophy, history, etc. are all
For example, he shows how video games were frowned upon, yet at the same time crime was on the decline. People suggested that video games were causing violence and causing children to become cruel, however, when video games were popular hate crimes were decreasing. This shows that not everything people believe is true because sometimes when people think something is causing harm it is actually doing the opposite. In addition, to the fact that I.Q. scores were on the rise in the decade when television, transistor radios and rock videos were available. When television was becoming widespread people thought that it might cause laziness and other disturbances, which it did, however, it caused I.Q. scores to increase tremendously. Although television has its drawbacks, it can help us attain information and learn about new things occurring all around the world. It expands our knowledge by giving us the chance of learning many new things in various fields. Again, Pinker backs up his point by facts that show that all the inventions haven’t turn the human brain to mush. All these inventions were denounced and people thought that they would threaten the brainpower of human beings. Pinker gives examples such as PowerPoints and search engines stating that they are causing people to rely on them so much that they solely depend on reading the main