Com 126 - Seeing into Plato's Cave - Communications and the Media

Mickey Schaub

3/20/2011

COM-126 Communications and the Media

I choose this application of Plato's idea because it was plain and simple. It had illustrations and it was easy to read. It had appealed to me because I was a correctional officer. I knew I wanted to be in Law enforcement and I obtained a degree in Political Science. At the time my body would not pass the physical agility test to become a Police officer. So, I settled for correctional officer and went to work at a prison in Ionia, Michigan called the Michigan Reformatory. Unfortunately, My body has gotten worse and I am disabled now.

The author used the article to give a list of numbered reasons to explain that the way people learn was like "Plato's cave." In number three he explained how Plato used shadows to explain how the prisoners learned. He is saying that we only perceive a percentage of information. Just like the way we only use ten percent of our brains. The prisoners saw a shadow and thought that was a book. Then when they were released they could turn their heads and see the whole objects and have a much clearer picture of what a book is.

The first thing that I thought stood out was the illustration of the inside of the cave. I could see where the fire was that reflected the puppets shadow onto the wall above where the prisoners

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were chained. I was able to see where the roadway was that the puppeteers performed on.

Another area of interest is how the author places those shadows in your own mind, when he says the prisoners call the shadows a book. But later they see what a book really is. It is not the object but the shadow that looks like a rectangle. He says that Plato's point: the general terms