The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

Places have the power to extract from us certain types of behavior, thought,and feelings. Bars pull for drinking behavior. Libraries encourage reading. Movietheaters elicit different emotions, depending on the movie being shown. Bychoosing where and how often we expose ourselves to these stimuli, we choosehow we will be affected. Advances in technology now permit us to bringenvironments into our homes: we can sit in front of the television set and seeanything from philosophical discussions to graphic violence. We can surf the weband bring into our home almost any type of written information, sound, or image.In the middle of the twentieth century, it was still difficult for mostindividuals to obtain information, sounds, or visual images. Television wasbeginning to be developed. Newspapers, magazines, books, and movies were themost popular of mass media. Finding them was still a task for most people, even inthe developed world. As the twenty-first century begins, we are barraged byinformation. The task for most of us is to manage this overwhelming amount ofmaterial. We want to obtain the benefits of having so much information at ourfingertips, without allowing the information to dull our senses, or to lead our mindsin directions that we have not chosen.This task will become greater as time goes on. It will become more andmore important to guide our children to choose their environments well, includingthe mass media environments to which they are exposed so easily. They need tolearn how to keep their internal environment healthy by consciously choosing theaspects of the external environment that they will expose themselves to. Themanagement of their external reality will greatly influence their internal reality.HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 89