Rashomon Effect

Skypeland is a perfect enviroment in which to witness the Rashomon Effect, named for the famous film of Kurosawa of that name in 1950. This film explores how different people can view the same event in different ways.

Many people complain that the news media in other cultures or countries are biased. Some in the West particularly will also complain about the media in their own countries. However, I will note that the only reason we even know what other media report is because of modern technology and communications.

Interestingly, many people do not realize that the media they consume regularly or the media soures in their own culture are potentially biased, or even inevitably biased. Some even refuse to acknowledge that different viewpoints exist, and that they do not all agree. It is sort of an extreme version of the Rashomon Effect; an inability or unwillingness to realize that differences even exist. However, I am optimistic that with more exposure to information from around the world, slowly people will come to grasp these concepts a bit better.

One cannot complain that the Western media do not show all the killing of the Palestinians daily by the Israelis and neglect the evidence of bias in the Arabic media, without looking very narrow minded. All the media sources are biased; we have to look at multiple sources and compare them to get a clearer picture of what is going on.