Two or three weeks ago the New Yorker carried a good article by Evan Osnos on the phenomenon of China's "angry youth" (fenqing). Much of the article was a profile of one young man in particular. In truth, he sounds more passionate than angry. It's worth reading the whole thing, but there was one section I found particularly interesting:

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

A couple of things stand out there. The first is the casual disdain with which China's Internet censorship issues are treated by computer literate youth. The main effect of Chinese censorship is to inflict inconvenience rather than lack of access. This doesn't excuse it, or make China's internet censorship any less of a disagreeable vestige of the Party's worst instincts. Even inconvenience serves a restrictive purpose. But the realities are that the net nanny is a good deal less omnipotent than she is sometimes made out to be and that, perhaps uncomfortably, unfettered access doesn't necessarily lead to a common point of view. (Another good article about Internet censorship is James Fallow's piece from the March 2008 Atlantic Monthly.)

But it was the last quote that really got me. It reminded me of a quote I read years ago in another article, which I've always tried to find again without any success. I think it was a Russian speaking to an American journalist, but it could have been someone from any country with a state-managed media. He said something like this (I necessarily paraphrase a bit):

"I feel sorry for you Americans. You have a free media, so you've never learned to read between the lines."

That's always stuck in my head, and I was interested to see Tang Jie offer a similar sentiment, if in somewhat different language.

So, does he have a point?

Imagethief believes it's the rare individual in most systems who asks himself, "Am I brainwashed?" Or even the slightly less charged, "How does media and propaganda influence me?" For raising the idea, Tang Jie deserves credit. In modern society most people swim in media and propaganda like fish swim in water. It's everywhere; occasionally we are acutely aware of it; but most of the time we swim through it with little thought for its effects on us.

I also believe that as Americans we sometimes fall into the trap of believing that operating in a country with a "free media" relieves us of the responsibility of having to think critically about the information we ingest. A PR person would be the first to say that it just ain't so. If anything, the volume and ubiquity of media in American society place an extra burden on us to consider its effects on how we think (although much of the rest of the world is catching up). Unfortunately, there seem to be two kinds of widespread media criticism in the US: Lofty, academic analysis that is interesting for a few but tiresome for many, and screaming at and denigrating people who espouse a different point of view on an emotional topic such as politics.

Media criticism and analysis should be a mandatory high school class in the United States. It should be taught not as rarefied analysis, but as a practical class: understanding the author of a message, teasing out the agenda, and identifying how a point of view or the construction of content affects how we respond to it. It should cover commercial and political media and entertainment. (Ask a professional film-maker how cinematic tools are used to subtly manipulate an audience's emotions and then look for those same tools being used in advertising.) It should also cover print, broadcast and the Internet and computer games. A semester of media criticism in high school isn't going to reinvent America's relationship with the media, but at least it would prompt people to ask that important question above: Am I brainwashed?

Although we as a nation are as vulnerable to propaganda as anyone, Imagethief doesn't think that Americans are brainwashed. That word, as originally conceived, implies violence and coercion that simply doesn't apply to us as willing and enthusiastic consumers of media (although parents of small children who have seen too many ads for sugary cereals may disagree). But it's good to keep asking the question. We may not be brainwashed, but we are certainly influenced deeply, and should be mindful of the water through which we swim.

Note: Yeah, this article has been out for a while. I subscribe to the New Yorker (speaking of media consumption, Imagethief, as full-on a media junkie as you are likely to find, is as guilty as anyone), but I only get about one out of three issues, and those tend to come late. The rest are presumably being read by extremely literate Chinese postal inspectors.