Thursday, May 22, 2003

on learning (correctly or otherwise) from fiction

Chris Mooney (the fellow Woody Woodpecker sighter) joins up with buddy Matt to explore how you could determine whether fictional movies affect moviegoers' perceptions of actual reality*, using X-Men and 'before' and 'after' moviegoing surveys. There's an easier way to get the data though - look at the frequency of mentions of holocaust revisionism before and after Schindler's List came out - I recall there seemed to be a considerable drop. You could probably do searches & counts of the relevant Usenet postings and get your results in an hour or two, which I hope someone else (Chris?) will do.

* I'm generalizing; they were focusing on 'knowledge and/or perceptions of science', not reality in general or history in particular.

No comments: