Media In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

The Power of Media

In our society, there’s always been rises of controversy about the information in media are reliable and it surely inserted truth as well as validity of believing. In Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, the controller of the World State Society Mustapha Mond believes that “whenever the masses [seize] political power, then it [is] happiness rather than truth and beauty that matter[s]” (Huxley). Likewise, we sometimes believe the power of media brings consequences of doubt of validity, destabilization of society, and destroys the pursuit of happiness. Although Mond’s argument has some flaws and restriction of some of individual freedom, ultimately he is right in his assertion that it is worthwhile to give up individual freedom of access media information for societal stability, because sometimes access to media advance insecurity of people as well as lowers the

credibility of society at the same time.
First of all, in Huxley’s Brave New World, the World State society depicts how the entertainment that combines sense of smells and touches in a movie format: feelies, with synthetic music brings pure happiness and the World State provides media information by hypnopaedia.

While people watching feelies and listening to synthetic music throughout the movie they enjoy entertained pleasure. For example, Mustapha Mond claimed “[feelies and the scent organ] mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensation to the audience” (Huxley 221). It is clear that the people are encouraged to get distraction whenever they needed from pure sensation. Also, by using hypnopaedia everyone in World State controlled and constructed to behave the same. For example, by teaching message such as “ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches…” people are being able to simply get rid of broken things rather than fix things (Huxley 49). From this statement, the society ensures that it has eliminated insecurity of society, because the society made them to control

easily.
In contrast, once the misinformation in mass media starts being widespread around the society, it would potentially affect the credibility of society, and in the future would bring mass communication and distrust of each other in society. Sometime people deliberately intended to provide trivial information in variety of internet services such as Facebook, Twitter, and etc., which stimulating interests of large amount of users in social media. According to the Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing, “it is much easier for people to accept a given piece of information than to evaluate its truthfulness” (Lewandowsky 1). For example, in The power of one wrong tweet on CNN, “hackers took over the Associated Press Twitter account and falsely claimed that there had been explosions at the White House and that the president was hurt. The tweet was up for a few minutes and retweeted more than 3,000 times before Twitter took the account offline” (Kelly 1). This shows how trivial comments or statements are more effectively catches interests and attention than the true fact that is left behind of the writer and the true information. Furthermore, “when people do take the time to thoughtfully evaluate the truth of information, they tend to focus on only a few of its characteristics” (Lewandowsky 2). The characteristics that falsely claimed from misinformation become more influential. From this statement it is pretty clear that eventually there would be mistrust and suspicion between each other.
In conclusion, if the media constantly delivers misinformation in variety ways to approach people’s interests and attention, eventually, the consequence of this would end up with suspiciousness and distrust of society that leads to instability. However, Mond’s argument in Brave New World is certainly more efficient to achieve societal stability along with happiness by sacrifice individual freedom of access to media.