Our daily life is based on different sources of mass media and its effects, which controls and modifies our life. Media is a mean of communication such as radio broadcasting, television, advertisement, newspapers and magazines that spreads to massive numbers of people. The mass media composes our framing environment such as advertisement of a new product line or a poster that advertises a new Ford SUV.
Nowadays, there are various methods and approaches that mass media could be approached. I would like to discuss two ways in which mass media affected my personal world. The first example is television. The messages children are internalizing from watching television is forming their sense of reality. Based on my personal experiences with my daughter, I have come to realize how this form of media affects her both positively and negatively. For example, watching different shows has a negative influence on my daughter by reinforcing gender roles, stereotypes and depicting risky behaviours. On the flip side, it has positive effects on my daughter by exposing her to different cultures and values and provides us with the opportunity to discuss different subjects or situations that she has viewed.
The second way mass media has affected my surrounding is how the web has developed from the late 1980s when I was in High School till today when I enrolled in University as a mature student. I remember in grade 11 I did a presentation on AIDS. This was done on a Bristol Board poster paper instead of a PowerPoint slide show. Furthermore, the research for the information was done by using the school library and/or the public library. However, with the advancement of the web and the discovery of many search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google, my most recent 2013 research about Holistic Healing involved exploring the web, gathering information and designing a PowerPoint. This shows the dramatic development the world experienced in terms of the internet and web functions. The web is a tool where we can find information and images to almost any topic. Based on my experience, I discovered that this tool has its advantages and disadvantages. The information is available to be easily accessed anytime and one site leads to another without the need of a hard copy. The required information can be selected and printed. But this information may not be reliable and the use of actual books is vanishing as the web is developing. Steve Jobs mentioned in an article "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
As it can be visible, mass media can affect our daily life, elevate social evolution and enhance thinking skills.
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