The mass media and modern society. The role of electronic and print media.

In the last 50 years the media influence has grown exponentially with the advance of technology, first there was the telegraph, then the radio, the newspaper, magazines, television and now the internet.

We live in a society that depends on information and communication to keep moving in the right direction and do our daily activities like work, entertainment, health care, education, personal relationships, traveling and anything else that we have to do.

We have put our trust on the media as an authority to give us news, entertainment and education. However, the influence of mass media on our kids, teenagers and society is so big that we should know how it really works.

Of all the media distribution channels the most influential has been the television, we are constantly exposed to thousands of images of violence, advertising, sex, celebrities and much more. So its important to be aware of what your kids are exposed to every day and you should also try to look at things from different perspectives and not just from the one the media gives you.

the media has a huge impact on society and also in public opinion. They can shape the public opinion in different ways depending of what is the objective.

For example, after the attacks of 911 the media gave a huge coverage of the event and exposed Osama guilty for the attack as they were told by the authorities. This shaped the public opinion to support the war on terrorism, the same happened with the war on Iraq. The problem is that if media received un accurate information then the public opinion supported a wrong cause, this is the power of public opinion influence.

Other ways to influence are with polls and trends, especially in political campaigns. The candidates that can pay for more tv and media exposure have more influence on public opinion and thus can receive more votes.

What for the electronic and print media, it also has a great impact. There is a problem of subscription: people don’t subscribe to newspapers, they stop reading books and just fully believe what they see on the screen. There is an opinion, that it’s the government, who rules this process and their aim is to create a non-thinking mass of citizens, who would be easy to control. That TV and Internet compose a so-called hole that will soon swallow us up and that it is just an amusement box, the sourse of entertainment . So our goal is to struggle with this illusion of being well-informed and acting like addicts of television. We shouldn’t let the government anyhow control our minds and stars using our own minds.