“The Mechanical Bride” Reflection

The first time I read through this article I didn’t seem to retain anything from it. In my mind, this was because one of two reasons, I either wasn’t fully concentrated on reading and comprehending the article or the article was harder to read because of it’s wording and the topic not being too clear. Thankfully I found out that it was the second reason and that I wasn’t alone on not getting it. But the more I read it, the more I could understand what he was getting at (even though I do so paragraph by paragraph). I think that he writes in a unusual but clever way, he seems to make a lot of metaphors and references in this article. I think that the main idea of popular culture blinding individuality is a topic that people don’t really want to talk about. People don’t want to criticize popular opinions and beliefs because there is always backlash and you then become a target. People conform to these beliefs because they are afraid of what other people will think about them if they don’t. You can see this conformity and backlash if you don’t conform to certain ideas and beliefs in many different areas and physical places in our society; religion, fashion, politics, the economy, sports, education, etc. The press and media affect us in both positive and negative ways. A few positive ways are: creating idols, awareness of ideologies, different beliefs, and finding out what interests you. A few negatives on the other hand are: it creates stereotypes, there is a loss of freedom to conformity, it creates a specific order in which you follow, and it can keep you from doing what you want. I do think that the media does do a bad job in basing their research on factual evidence, they tend to go off of what they think about a topic or  they go off of what other people heard or just try to get a headline worthy article to get something in the spotlight,  which creates false information and may even ruin a persons life/ create a bad reputation for them. For example the news stations (most) created a bad reputation for and had a bad view on Donald Trump as President because he criticized them for not being truthful all of the time or as he puts it “fake news.” Which in a sense he is correct in saying because it does happen a lot. In conclusion I think we need to stop relying on the media for creating personal beliefs or ideologies for us and do it on our own. We need to stop being easily offended by the littlest criticisms and let people think what they want to think, say what they want to say, and do what they want to do (in reason of course). In other words, just ignore the haters and keep doing what makes you happy.