Couch Potatoes vs Hope

Robert McChesney says in his article (212) “The Media System goes Global” reproduce the following paragraph of a Swedish journalist: “Unfortunately, the trends are very clear, moving in the wrong direction on virtually every score, and there is a desperate lack of public discussion of the long-term implications of current developments for democracy and accountability”.

That pessimistic approach could be more aggravated if we use the following explanation of Yuen Foong Khong in his book “Analogies at War” (13) about the limitations of human beings regarding their capacities to process of information. He says that “The psychology of analogical reasoning begins with the idea that human beings are creatures with limited cognitive capacities. As a result, a means by which the cope with the enormous amount of information they encounter is reliance on ‘knowledge structures’ such as analogies or schemas. These knowledge structures help them order, interpret, and simplify, in a word, to make sense of their environment. Matching each new instance with instances stored in memory is then a mayor was human beings comprehend their world”.

However, I really believe that the internet and the contra-flows (at the local and at the international level) of information described by Thussu, give us hope because that the individuals –if they assumed an active role- have the option of no being ‘passive consumers or couch potatoes.”