Occupy Wall Street
I thought this class was very interesting and very relevant to the current state of the democracy and America in general. For example, a copious amount of people march in protest of the government at demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street but the amount of people that actually know what is going on might be limited. This could be an example of the hypodermic needle model- a group of people begin protesting, big news channels begin filming them and showing the clip on their nightly news, and the rest of the public sees this, assumes the protesters are right, and they start protesting themselves. This could be regardless of if they really know what is going on; this could be just because they see a group of people protesting and assume it's the normal thing to do. This is very interesting because it doesn't really go along with either Dewey or Lippmann. This is an example of the blind leading the blind- Lippmann would think these protests are useless because the elites will always rule the country, in this case it would be the top 1%. Dewey would think that the public should be informed of the facts so they can make their own decisions because they have enough intelligence, but that is not what should happen either because the people creating the 'informed decisions' are again the top 1%. This all comes down to the top 1% making America think what they want. They share their ideas and thoughts through mass media, which could just be opinions instead of actual facts and the public will take it all in and start believing what the media wants them to believe.