The Social Dominance Theory:  A Mediated Culture

If you ever have the unfortunate pleasure of finding yourself taking a sociology class, one of the first things you will learn is a term sociologists refer to as a “Mediated Culture,” also known to some as “Media Shadowboxing,” and to those fortunate few, as The Social Dominance Theory.

According to The Social Dominance Theory of a Mediated Culture, human social systems are inclined to form social hierarchies in which a group exerts power over all those not of the same social standing, gender, race, creed, belief or financial gain.  For instance, feminist organizations that believe men are the inferior race and should not be seen as equals or victims of domestic abuse, would apply as a perfect example for this current topic.

These social hierarchies become apparent when the group assigns social groupings in a way that best maintains their own power. For example, groupings that state or show that Men are the all dominate group and thus cannot be abused by the lesser woman group and thus, determines for itself that they and only they are entitled to be classified with certain titles and privileges which flows to them.

 A way for such organization to “maintain” this power is to only show or do studies on woman and domestic abuse, while discrediting, ignoring, or even discarding any relevant information that could show that men are just as much victims of abuse by their female partners.

Meanwhile, penalties and inequities, or rather “untrue” facts flow to others based on their membership of that inferior group (men of female domestic violence for example). These racist and bias forms of social oppression are seen as manifestations of the group’s social hierarchy.

A simpler example of Social Dominance in a Mediated Culture, is often used when applied to how the mass media (such as TV, press, and radio, for example) constantly bombard us with their version of facts, so much that our society eventually falls prey to these interpretations of events, regardless the lack of actual truth. The owners of these Media outlets are thus part of the social dominate hierarchy.

This is similar, oddly enough, to some forms of repetitive verbal abuse, or abusive “conditioning,” or “Gaslighting,” where the abuser continues to abuse the victim with verbal, demeaning attacks, until they begin to believe it themselves, thus breaking them to the point of conditioning.

This persuasion, or rather personal skew of facts, studies, surveys, thus changes the intrinsic mood and attitude of the public thus making most people of the society in believing the media’s politically correct norms as truth, thus discarding any viable information that speaks to the contrary.

In fact, if you take this same construct to the next level, you can easily show that, at certain times in our own nation’s history, it has been the mediated culture, which has set the tone of our own personal morals and beliefs.  Thus changing the moral and ethical values of all people to what the media has dictated to be politically correct and moral, thus eliminating the individual from the ideal equation.

Keep this theory in mind when reading the following information as you may be surprised at the pattern that follows.