Here’s a story (and cognitive illusion) I wish I knew about when talking about the media and sense perception during the podcast on Media Literacy.
Apparently, the McGurk effect (brilliantly illustrated in the video above) shows what happens when our senses are placed in conflict with one another. As this demonstration shows, when we are exposed to audio information that conflicts with visual information trying to tell us what we should be hearing, these visual cues tend to win out, even if they are wrong.
Just nifty lab stuff? Well what might happen if you were watching a video of a news event (such as noisy political event with less than perfect sound), which required you to read subtitles to know what was being said? And what if, just if, those subtitles were doctored in order to get you to think something was said that actually wasn’t?
And (just for the sake of argument) what if such a video was distributed on YouTube, then picked up by a major cable TV network and broadcast as straight news, following the exact trajectory from manipulator to blogs to major media outlet that Ryan Holiday describes in his book Trust Me I’m Lying regarding how to trick the media in order to get your fraudulent message delivered to the world?
Couldn’t happen? Or could it?
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