Americans' experiences inform the symbol's potent meaning For
many years, students in speech and mass communications classes
learned about "the bullet theory of communication" (later
renamed "the hypodermic needle theory"). The idea was that the
message was contained entirely in a tidy packet that lodged in
the recipient, changing perception and influencing behavior in
ways that were beyond that person's power to resist, and
affecting every recipient in exactly the same way. The theory
was easy to disprove simply because recipients do not react
uniformly. Instead, the information delivered to them interacts
with information they already possess. For example, news of a
shooting in a Connecticut school horrifies everyone, but it
affects the parent of a child in that school differently than it
affects a childless person in Colorado. The difference is not a
flaw in the message, nor is it the "fault" of the diverse
recipients. It's just the way communication works. Flags are
powerful symbols, culturally loaded not