MAKALE

 “HOW CAN WE HAVE A STRONG MENTAL STRENGTH?”

Emrah Altuntecim

The people who are healthy are selective in their diets. Nurturing a healthy mind and spirit is also very important for all of us.

Thoughts determine goals, goals determine actions, actions determine habits, and habits determine your character. The sources of our thoughts directly affect our lives through the choices we make: the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the places we want to go. Just like an athlete who wants to be successful and raise his/her performance with an appropriate diet, we have to take care of our intellectual food as well as our daily physical food in order to be a good search and rescue team member. We have to avoid unnecessary mental junk food and be selective. If and when necessary, we might have to go on a mental diet. We have to become somewhat lighter to be able to enter the triangles of life in our inner and outer universe.

Our intellectual food sources are as follows:

- Media

- Books

- Movies

- Family members

- Friends

We have to be careful in choosing our intellectual food sources, making an effort to select the most positive, cheerful, enriching, and virtuous sources. The people who have dedicated themselves to the search and rescue approach are full of energy and motivated. Our intellectual nutrition may either increase or decrease our level of energy and motivation. It is certainly useful to be selective.

There are series of measures available which could be taken against a great deal of the cannonade of messages transmitted by the mass media. The mass media consists of a system working to meet the expectations of the society, and reflects the society, and deliberately uses the remarkability of “suffering”. It is also possible for you to hear the details of these studies, which have been made in this field, during any lecture given by the academicians working in more than twenty faculties of communication in my country.

At last, I have come to the below conclusion, which may be somewhat harsh:

Get rid of your television!

However, there is another way that is more difficult, but effective:

Develop your self control and selectiveness. Evaluate the” box of the dumb” as a box of education and turn it into an educational tool.

It is possible to say 90% of the struggles made by television have been won by television.

I had a chance to learn a lot about this issue as a result of many studies and the research that I did at university during my undergraduate and post graduate education. Now I want to explain the effect of the mass media, especially TV, as it is important for the self search and rescue approach.

For those who want to actualize the self search and rescue approach, beware of the television, or the “dangerous box”. Television has a big effect on us and this effect is generally negative. Does mass media control you? The answer of this question is unfortunately “yes” for most people. In this sense, as McLuhan says “The world is transforming into a small village day by day”. So what is being experienced in this village? Media creates a new history, a new awareness and new objectives by using the power of communication, which is crucial for human life. Media plays a determinative role in cultural, economic and social choices of people. Also the artificial needs, that are manufactured, start to be as determinant as the real needs regarding politics, fashion and general tendency accordingly.

To examine the messages that we take from the mass media in detail requires thinking; being aware that every message has an expectation from us, we can take the time to research and become informed about the subject and the sources of information. However, most people do not want to waste time talking about the media. Unfortunately, it could be that they are uneducated or uninformed about the media, or that they find it meaningless to become involved with issues that they think are not effecting them in the short run.

Mass communication is a unidirectional communication provided by mean such as newspapers, magazines, radios, televisions, films, the internet and books. Mass media effects our decisions on many matters like our consumer habits, appearance, and especially the social groups in which we take part.

Lance Bennett explains the power of the information that mass media forwards to the community as follows:

If you are in a position that you control who talks, how much they talk, determine how reliable they are and what they talk about, then consider how much power of influence you have. People would tell you that you are a tyrant or a dictator. However, news are seldom labeled tyrants or dictators.

Writing is not only a form of communication but an opportunity and a medium of thought; it gives a shape to the thought mechanism of human beings, it provides an evaluation of perception. However, when the radio and television are discussed, the situation is different. Because the human mind is also receptive at that time, the synchronistic effect of the visual and audial perception make it nearly impossible for people to think.

The media indirectly control the political, economic, and cultural agendas. The media use uses mass communications according to their agenda and mold public opinion according to that agenda.

We discussed research about the relation between the self search and rescue technique and the media by referring to the ideas of respected scientists and philosophers in the field of communications.

Lets beware of mental obesity!