The Mystery and Meaning Reading was very interesting and I am definitely guilty of many of the things that the reading describes. I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, so I am always coming up with different possible scenarios in my head. I also analyze myself and others because I find it so interesting to understand people and how they ended up as the person they are today. After reading this, I was glad to know that it’s not just me who likes to have an answer to everything.
However, the reading also discussed how when we don’t have all the information or answers about a person, we use what we have seen in the past to fill in the blanks ourselves. This made me think of Taylor Swift and how everyone used to say that she dated so many guys and wrote songs about all of them when they broke up because she was probably a crazy girlfriend. This caused her to get so much hate which is just wrong. I think this exemplifies what the reading was talking about because the public only knows her through magazines and interviews so they do not know her really well. So, they used the information they’ve seen in the past, which would be Taylor dating lots of guys and writing songs about ex-boyfriends, and created their own narrative to make sense of it, which is that she was a crazy (ex)girlfriend. This is only one example of how we can taint someone else’s image to our own eyes and how by doing so we are hurting them.
I’ve learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in my ldst 102 class and I still can’t believe that happened. It scares me to think that humans can so easily change and become corrupt once they receive power. And it makes me wonder why power is so important to us.
I completely agree, I was thinking about how the public forces so many personas on celebrities because it si what we want to think. I feel like this is why often times when people meet their idols they are always disappointed.
Your example with Taylor Swift definitely reminds me of how quick we are to turn our back on certain celebrities. We have this belief that we know who they are, their character, but the minute a “scandal” of sorts arises, we switch our allegiances quick.
I also completely agree. We have such a quick ability to shun and turn our backs. People ask all the time are powerful people corrupt? Yes, some. However, we are all humans and make mistakes. This is not an excuse for those who are biggots, tyrants and rapists. However, this is an explanation for people like Swift who like most of us are just trying to figure it out.
The point in the Mystery and Meaning reading you brought up about our minds using past experiences to fill in the gaps reminded me a lot of mindbugs. We make educated guesses – often without knowing it – based on what prior knowledge tells us, and that’s apparent in many aspects of life.
I also found it unbelievable that our brain fills in a lot of the missing pieces in our world. There is so much stimuli going on around us that our brain has to fill in pieces of it to make sense of it.
What’s particularly crazy about the Stanford Prison Experiment is that not only the Guards and the Prisoners were corrupted, but the people running the experiment as well. They allowed themselves to fall too far into their roles, and forgot who they really were.