Plato's Cave and Mass Media

Plato’s allegory of the cave reminds me of our relationship with mass media these days. Imagine we are the prisoners in the cave. A fire behind us is mass media and shadows on a wall are the information we get from the mass media. Not knowing whether the information is true or not, we have no choice but to believe because there is no way for us to ascertain its genuineness. Here is the example from my experiences. Before I came to this country, I used to picture America as one huge New York City with beautiful, well-dressed ladies busily walking on a street. Of course, I was wrong. In Tulsa where my family began a new life, no one was walking on a street at all. I realized what I heard or imagined were just false conceptions made from mass media, such as movies and TV shows that I had watched. Information we can get from the media is very limited and sometimes even biased. Even though shadows we see are animals’, we do not know how animals look like until we actually go outside the cave and see them.