Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Researches

The media plays an important role in our society. During the years, the media improved a lot. The development from year to year brings innovation to humanity in  different ways. Social media becomes a way to express ourselves in public. The information is available all the time. Everyone has access from everywhere in the world. Smart phones and laptops that did not exist before, let us to use social media daily. Therefore, the effects of the media could be negative. Popular movies or videos games that appear in any kind of mass media are influential on us. Sometimes people find it difficult to make the separation between what they are seeing on the screen to the real life. According to the book Media&Culture by R.Campbell, “There are four trends of between 1930 and 1960 that contributed to the rise of modern media research: propaganda analysis, public opinion research, social psychology studies, and marketing research.” However, we can see these methods of research in three examples, such a violence, racism and gender.

We have a lot of portrayals of violent behavior in the media. Kids who are watching television and exposed to killing or fighting have a bad influence because they are taking that as an example and imitate it in their life. Therefore, parents tried to avoided them by blocking this kind of channels back home, however it is hard to control it all the time because they can watch it on the internet. This is an example of social learning theory which includes four steps: attention, retention, motor reproduction and motivation. As an illustration, the “Bobo doll” experiment had children watching violent behavior then copy the action of what they see.

The media has a big effect on the way races are viewed by society and it can be in any kind of mass media. As humans, we cannot stop the racism around the world suddenly in one day. However, the first step can come from the media side. Racism cannot be terminated only by the people around. Media is powerful and we have to use it right without hurting other people. The term racism as we all know, is actually a belief that are many differences between races and that your own race is superior and has the right to control other people. As an example, if we open internet and we google ‘beautiful women’, most of the results are white women and there are only a few other ethnicities. Therefore, the internet supplies information that is not actually true because there are bunch of beautiful women around the world and their skin color does not matter. Whenever people going to google the ‘beautiful women’ and they going to see the results that our media provide the stigma will stay.

          Gender stereotypes are another example of how the public is effected by the mass media. We know how much power mass media have today. People are not just provided with information from the media, they affect their lives by shaping their opinions. Focus on the gender roles in our society manifests by another stigma that men are more dominant than women.  Today the differences are smaller than in the past, when men have been the one who taking care of the house and work hard to support his family and women were the housewives. We all can see how media still using those gender stereotypes and influences the public attitude whenever social groups display on media in negative way. Passing any message in the media can create a certain image of reality as a result the real perspective display wrong, even though people already aware about the unequal of social groups in the media.

            The media has a big power over us. What people are not seeing is that any information that passing through the media affects us in negative way sometimes. Children are very easy to impact and they are usually the ones who spend many hours watching television or just on the internet checking what is going on, Social media becomes a big part of their life, however their parents cannot control what they are seeing all the time.  The information is available and the access is free to anyone, which is hard to avoid from unnecessary information.