So Long, Passivity

by Marissa DuBois

The Influencing Machine

Authored by: Brooke Gladstone; Illustrated by: Josh Neufeld

181 pages

Published by W. W. Norton & Company

$16.95 USA

     The coffee pours, breakfast sits on the table and the news echoes throughout the kitchen every morning. My family has spent every morning and evening around the kitchen table listening to NBC. The new has fed us our daily supply of information, trends, and scope of reality. Now I wonder how much that has influenced who I am today… 

   “ Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation”

–      The Influencing Machine

‘Influencing Machine” photo credit: (http://www.wbur.org/npr/161294597/what-the-influencing-machine-teaches-college-kids)

              Brooke Gladstone interprets the media as our main source of influence, but communicates a desire for us to reject passivity in return. Let’s consider how we can be influential in return. We, too, are the sculptors of the media.

Brooke Gladstone, co-host and editor of NPR’s On the Media, has long worked in the field of journalism. Gladstone working as a media analyst authored The Influencing Machine. In an interview with The New York Observer, Gladstone described the book as a “a treatise between us and the news media.” Gladstone explained the concept in the interview as the psychological idea that some external device controls our thoughts and emotions.

As a visual person - and not so much reader - I found myself immersed into a story of an evolving yet, ever-present media world. Unlike a simple story and words, Brooke Gladstone’s voice in The Influencing Machine transcends the author/reader barrier by incorporating imagery and words into a comic book. Gladstone’s perspective, as a journalist, was refreshing and empowering.

   Gladstone recreates a 2,000-year history of the media through detailed visual presentation that illuminates how the media got where they are, where they're going, and how the influence they project onto consumers matter. Gladstone unearths the media’s fight for objectivity. Gladstone addressed these ideas: is objectivity even achieved? Strived for? What kinds of biases are there? And what is with this prejudicing?

“Objective-Journalism” (Missouri Communication) Photo credit: (http://missouricommunication.wordpress.com/tag/objectivity/ )

            The process that The Influencing Machine takes you on helps to determine Gladstone also demonstrated that there is a tendency of prejudice in us all. Take the Implicit test online to determine your inclination to prejudices. We all have it in us.

I recommend The Influencing Machine as a particularly fond read for those who question the media, those who are intrigued by the media, and especially for students studying media.