July 20th
Subliminal Messaging has always been fascinating to me, and I've always wanted to explore how it worked. After looking over the slides I now understand that it doesn't work. I remember when i was little, my mom never let me watch Spongebob, Ed Edd and Eddy, or Wizards of Waverly Place (very specific choices I know) because she heard they had subliminal anti-catholic messages. I'm glad I can finally tell her that she was wrong! Anyway, as I was further looking into subliminal messages in children's media for this post, I found this article explaining hidden messages in shows like My Little Pony or Adventure Time. These shows (supposedly) have post apocalyptic messages with themes such as magical creatures being reinserted to ecosystems to save these ecosystems from collapse, going to other planets to escape earth or find the solution to save earth, inevitable apocalyptic demise, and etc. This website was that Adventure Time was glorifying the atomic bombs and saying that it could make children think that "life would be more rad if an A-bomb dropped".
Obviously, after applying critical thinking and looking deeper into this article, the claims are based on minimal information and mostly the authors own opinions. As a child who grew up watching some shows mentioned on this list, I (at least consciously) have not observed any signs of these subliminal messages taking effect. As the slides mention, studies have not found subliminal messaging to be effective in changing behaviors. This article further proves to be an example of pseudoscience and fast thinking with unreliable/limited sources and profound claims with little evidence backing them up.
Posts
I read the article you linked and while it is subliminal messaging because it plants ideas in the viewer’s mind, it seems to do it in a different way than the stereotypical hidden inaudible noises and frequencies. It seems those shows the article mentions are more like deep-lore fan theories and world building than extreme subliminal messaging. The idea of Adventure time making children more accepting of nuclear weapons is creating a ridiculous idea and theme, and can still lead to negative consequences. Shows don’t need to implement full subliminal messaging to have bad or suggestive ideas in the. Super interesting.
ReplyDelete