I have spent the past week realizing that you can apply the ideas of manipulation and choice to just about everything that you encounter, from something as obviously manipulatory as a commercial to something as simple as the letter a (my mind is still scrambled from our discussion of why the letter a has to be the first in our alphabet).
All of this thinking has led me to two conclusions. The first of which is that you can use the ideas of manipulation to follow chains of manipulation to eternity. A is the first letter of our alphabet because we were manipulated by our Roman ancestors to think A came first. The Romans were manipulated by their Greek ancestors with alpha, and so on. There is no point, in my opinion to try to follow manipulation back to its source because I do not think that there is one. The value, to me, of seeing through layers of manipulation comes from seeing how the manipulation is effecting you.
This leads me to my second conclusion: that this class should not be called “Truth, Lies and Literature,” but rather “How to See Through the Bullshit and Make More Educated Choices.” An example of this that came to me this week was the idea of Turning Stone and gambling. I had to pick a friend up from the airport Sunday night (although a weather delay made Sunday night turn into 2:30 AM Monday morning), and as I was driving to the airport I saw the giant lit sign on the top of the huge building. As I drove, partially to keep myself awake, I found myself thinking about all the manipulation that surrounded gambling, from lottery ads to casino ads to social pressure one way or another to anti-gambling addiction agencies. I realized that even though people have a lot of different opinions on the subject, and that seeing through their manipulations did not change that, seeing how they were manipulating their audience gave me a better base of knowledge. That means that the next time someone asks “Hey, wanna go to Turning Stone tonight?” I will be able to make a much firmer decision one way or the other.
Casinos are so interesting to look at it terms of manipulation of customers. While some myths surrounding casinos (such as the rumor that casinos pump extra pure oxygen into their rooms in order to lull their customers into a calmer sense in order to encourage increased spending) are false, other manipulative aspects of casinos as presented by pop culture can and have been verified. For example, there truly are backrooms where security monitors the various tables and they put forth an intimidating presence to those (such as the MIT card counting teams in the 90s) who are conspicuously "lucky". The constant din of machine sounds found throughout casinos is probably likely to put forth an atmosphere of constant winnings, while that isn't necessarily the case.
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