Presentation

Hello and welcome to my presentation on how media conspiracies affect society

I will be exploring the question - do you think conspiracy theories that we see on social media change our outlook on the world?

The most popular conspiracy theory known to date is The Mandela Effect - this is a flase memory shared by multiple people; it stems from the idea that many people believed that Nelson Mandela had died whilst he was in prison in the 80's rather than when he died in 2013; there are many other reasons behind this such as there could be alternate realities and there could be evidence of parallel universes or computer simulations.

However, the human memory could be wrong and could purely just be ignorance of a certain subject. Many of the people that remembered Mandela dying were not South African and many South Africans said they did not remember the event taking place - is it possible that people just misinterpreted information or is there a presence changing history?

The increase in popularity can be seen within social media - many adverts and links to other webpages begin to entice us in with questions we want to know the answer to - there are also references to the Mandela Effect in many tv shows such as the X files, here is a clip showing such reference...

There can be negative effects on conspiracy theories, here are some to name a few - it decreases social engagement and allows people to question social hierarchies, this in turn threatens social systems.

Why do we find them so interesting?

I want you to think about this quote - 'the truth may be out there but the lies are in your head'

This links tot the idea that many conspiracy theories actually can be damaging to us as a human race - the theory surrounding vaccines giving children autism has made the amount of children receiving vaccines decrease over the last few years this means more children are getting diseases due to what we believe in our minds from the media

Psychologists have also discovered that all of the people who actually believe conspiracy theories have a certain personality, they all have a false sense of confidence; are open to experience; are narcissist and have low agreeability and reject social conformity

I believe that conspiracy theories are a very interesting way to view the world and give us another outlook on the things we find normal - however, I do believe that they have a negative effect on society and how we see everyone and everything

Conspiracy theories do change our outlook on the way we see society as we believe them due to multiple people remembering the same thing; the idea that we all want to control our own lives by knowing what is going on and offers a sense of security

However, we may not want to believe it due to there being an nderlying desire to be part of n in-group in society and the idea that we are ignorant to certain facts