 Long before entering academia and helping to create educational content, I worked behind the scenes as a commercial broadcast engineer at the top news station in one of the most competitive markets in the U.S. On any given day, I could find myself working with Oprah Winfrey or Peter Jennings or even a former U.S. president, but most of the job was focused on news programming. Working behind the scenes is a dispassionate process. The role was to be part of the broadcast delivery machine without any responsibility for decision-making or content creation. This sparked my early interest in how the audience consumes and understands mass communication, and when combined with the growing role of social media, whether there was a fundamental public misunderstanding of the difference between news, editorials, and opinion. In other words, how can meta-literacy help grow an informed citizenry, the foundation of our democracy? What role do we each play in taking responsibility for how the content we choose to consume affects us? When millions of people see, hear, and experience the same images, sound, and representations of an event together, it can have a collective impact on our conscience. Whether it's a World Cup or the Super Bowl or the events of 9-11 or the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, we experience a shared emotional effect. This phenomena of a collective experience captured my curiosity, and I began researching the origins of meta-literacy even before I left my broadcast career. Let's consider some definitions. The term media is plural for medium. Mass communication mediums include books, magazines, broadcast radio and television, cable systems, wireless and computer networks, the internet, any system that can transmit a message from one point of origin to mass numbers of people. But what about the definition of media impact? Impact, the force of impression of one thing on another. A significant or major effect, the impact of science on our society or an environmental impact study. What about the term effect, media effect? An effect always follows a cause. So if you stumble or fall on a sidewalk, which is causal, the effect would be a scraped knee and probably pain. If you're watching a sad movie, a cause, the effect could be a tight throat or tears welling up in your eyes. Both media impact or media effect suggest that content delivered through a mass medium will have an impact or an effect on the receiver, or termed more accurately a consumer of content. The phenomena of a shared experience is the result of media effects or media impact should first be grounded or considered in light of what the receiver or again termed more accurately the consumer brings to the message. Once human behavior evolved beyond the needs of hunter-gatherers, we began to understand how emotion can predict behavior. For example, nobody wants to be thought of or judged as stupid or immoral or unbalanced by others. Anyone would feel hurt, angry or slighted by even the suggestion. Leaving aside the art of human interaction, how we phrase interactions with each other, let's first consider the norming effect and how culture informs our individual worldview, which in turn affects how we make meaning of the constant stream of messages we're exposed to and how we react to them. Definition of worldview, the confluence of values, emotions, and ethics, or the moral compass is how we understand the world around us. Professor Abraham Maslow postulated in 1943 that we have a hierarchy of needs that informs human behavior. The foundation is the need for physiological fundamentals like food, water, and shelter. Next, we need to feel safe and secure to preserve health, wellness, and financial security, the elements that protect us from accidents or harm. Humans need to exist in a community. We have a need to develop friendships, pursue romance, build family, and be part of structured organizations with shared values like churches or community groups. And community feeds into our need to feel accomplishment, prestige, and self-esteem. We strive to gain acceptance through professional or personal activities that reinforce our value. This helps explain the need to seek out others who agree and reinforce our worldview. We bond over shared experience and the more personal it is to each of us, the more powerful the effect. Even gossip, which most people agree is destructive, provides a sense of a shared experience because when we build allies to reinforce our worldview, we experience a sense of safety and belonging. Changing a worldview isn't easy. Even motivated individuals who want to change their worldview or broaden it have difficulty because it's formed at such an early age and strongly influenced by the culture in which we grew up. The old saying, people won't remember what you say, but they'll remember how you made them feel applies to how our worldview was formed. And as Maslow suggested, the perception of fear has the greatest influence on how we respond. In Heatherton and Weiler's book, Prius or Pickup, How Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide, a random sample tested the worldview of individual Americans by asking which of the two statements they most resonated with. Perhaps consider which statement you identify with. Obviously, there is no correct answer. The first is our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves. Or it's a big beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated. The result? About half of the survey's respondents chose each option, suggesting that Americans are split roughly evenly. Those who perceive physical threats tend to be more suspicious of people who don't look like them, and that threats stemming from cultural change, including mass immigration, are all around them. But people who perceive their surroundings as a beautiful world are less likely to believe that racial and cultural change is dangerous. In fact, they're more likely to believe that the real danger lies in not embracing change. Heatherton's findings illustrate and help explain how America's cultural and political division and the rise of fake news can take root more easily than we might realize. Particularly when people do not understand the fundamental differences between professionally produced news, professional editorials, and opinion freely available on social media and fostered by non-professional blogs or websites which often obscure political or public relation agendas. Professor George Gerbner, father of the mean world theory, provided evidence that violence on television has a powerful effect on viewers' perceptions of the world, particularly if their worldview is fear-based. He testified before Congress in 1981 that, and I quote, fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, hard-line measures. Close quote. Gerbner cautioned that traditional culture and values rooted in parenting, church, and community tradition were slowly being taken over by large media conglomerates who have no story to tell but a great deal to sell. Combining the expertise of serious communication researchers with work grounded in social psychology and sociology, a powerful argument can be made that the worldview that consumer brings to media reinforces a personal belief system. This is what makes the so-called media echo chamber a concern. A meta-literate consumer of knowledge understands that by nature human beings are attracted to those of a similar mindset to reinforce our beliefs. Maslow framed how we need these relationships to reinforce our sense of social value and competence within our own chosen communities. Meta-literate people understand the importance of relying on reliable experts and multiple sources of information, even when a viewpoint doesn't resonate with their own core values. The human quality of empathy, the ability to suspend your worldview in order to consider that of another person's, is a powerful tool in critical thinking and critical to an informed democracy.