1F25 Blog Response 1: Media Impact on Others

03 Oct 2013

1F25 Blog Response 1: Media Impact on Others

How signiﬁcant do your classmates believe the impact of the mass media is on their worldviews, and does this change your impression of the media’s impact on you?

The first entry I want to talk about is from Brittany (http://cpcframblings.blogspot.ca/). She wrote about the positive and negative effects of mass media.

Mass media can be a positive influence

“As as aspiring writer and poet, advertisements in the mass media about different websites and resources for writing have been extremely helpful.” (http://cpcframblings.blogspot.ca/)

“Another writer and teacher friend of mine had an idea to start a website about different world issues. Once he finished working on the website, his whole idea took off.” (http://cpcframblings.blogspot.ca/)

Or it can be a negative influence

“The mass media constantly feeds society unrealistic images of what we should be, what we should wear and how we should look.”

I agree that mass media can be good and bad. I think it’s really cool how mass media provides us with a resource of near unlimited possibilities or how social media makes it easy to send a message to a wide audience. While all this sounds great we have to remember that mass media can be a bad thing as well. When dealing with mass media we have to be cautious. By telling women AND men how think or act the media can have a negative influence on us.

Oh and Brittany if you ever read this which I doubt you will, send me a link to your teacher friend’s website 🙂

Speaking about being cautious Taradactyl err…Tara (http://taradactyl25.wordpress.com/) talks about how the media is everywhere and how it bombards us with different messages. Making it tough to distinguish what is true from what isn’t.

“It is almost impossible now to look at just one source and get the full information, due to the fact that there are so many untrustworthy sources.” (http://taradactyl25.wordpress.com/)

In my previous entry I wrote about the benefits of obtaining information from mass media. I said that mass media provides us multiple opinions thereby encouraging us to think. She however argues that sometimes mass media is not reliable. If the article does not cover the whole truth, whatever ideas and opinions generated from reading that article won’t have any true meaning. This parallels real life where you might not get the whole story from someone, so you have to ask multiple people and try to fit the pieces together. While I still believe that mass media is a great source of information, reading her blog encourages me to further research anything I see on the internet.

Mass media presents us with a lot of jumbled up ideas and we have to piece them together

Lastly, Brent’s (http://bb11tl.wordpress.com/) entry was about how mass media can negatively influence and even change us. He talked about how tragic events presented in the media changed his once heroic ideals.

“The once great world filled with heroes in my mind was changed into a world full of tragedy and evil which made me realize how ugly and disgusting the world truly is.” (http://bb11tl.wordpress.com/)

While I believe that media can have a negative influence, I want to say that there is a way to fight back. Reading his article, I can’t help but think about Batman. The essence of Batman contains both heroism and tragedy. Batman’s world is full of tragedy but he fights for the last strand of good left in the world. Even if mass media tries us to tell us something we can still fight for our beliefs. We affect the media just as much as it affects us. In my first blog entry I wrote about how the public made Disney think twice about presenting young girls with an unrealistic representation of beauty. We as individuals have a voice in the way media is presented.