The Media... dun dun dun

After watching The Day After Tomorrow in class I kept thinking how Dennis Quaid's character actually broke the mold of the 'scientist' which the media usually portrays. True, he did sleep in the lab and say some very dramatic lines-- but if there was such a catastrophic event as a modern ice age, I think I would expect the head scientists to be in the labs and I wouldn't want him making one liners at a press conference. He was attractive (yet still a white male), seemed socially competent, put together, had an ease communicating and didn't wear a white coat the whole time.

Adding onto this concept, Megan showed us slides of the different images of the stereotyped scientist and asked us if we agreed with the images. I think that this exercise demonstrates a communication theory known as the Third Person Effect. After looking at the white coat, glasses-wearing, nerdy images of scientist in media I thought to myself, "okay I know that that is not what real scientists look like, but that is what other people think." This is precisely what the theory states. It says that people tend to think that other people are more susceptible to media's effect (in this case, the image of a scientist) than they are (the effect = that people really view scientist this way). However, subconsciously, they are still just as susceptible as the general public (demonstrated in our own images of scientist that we drew earlier in the semester). It is a very interesting theory and I think it fits very well with our current topic of media effects. Check it out!