Impact of Media on Our Society

Media is the collective means of communication by using most common forms of communicatory mediums that basically reach and effectively influence people. It moved through newspapers, magazines, books, television, radio, computers and the internet. Nowadays, as technology and the internet community go rampant, there is no doubt that media made a great impact in our society. Take these following questions in mind. Do you feel you want to think and act like a double-cross agent in movies? Do you want your hair to look like the hairstyle of some celebrities? Of course you would not want to dress like an old 60’s merchant rather, you would basically intend to dress yourself up and be in with the latest fashion. If you agree with the situations above and your answer to those questions is “yes”, then you knew and somehow accepted already the idea that media influenced people. These are just simple examples which describe the way how media affected our culture, our entire society and our daily lives. It dramatically changes the way we talk, the way we think, and even the way how we take and react to basic things around us.

Impacts of media can either deal positive or negative outputs. To be blunt, media did a great job on improving people, enabling them to communicate more effectively. As you noticed communication – including the way how people of different race and language interact with each other – on the past centuries is very loose. At present, by the use of simple translators and the internet this difficulty, if not eliminated, is somehow reduced to a lower level. Furthermore, media influenced people on how they perceive, develop or even gain knowledge. As media and technology paired together, knowledge moves rapidly from one person to another.

Unfortunately, on the negative part, media modified the way people value life and culture. As media is getting so much accessible, people will apparently be exposed and influenced. Unknowingly, they already do and perceive things in a bad way. Assume a situation where a celebrity did something immoral and the incident was spread widely on publications and news. People, especially children and young adults will usually mimic someone popular as such not knowing they are already being immoral. In order to handle this issue, we have to be vigilant and put ourselves in control. Traditional way of providing parental guidance and filtering the amount of unnecessary media content to our children will help lessen the negative impacts of media in our society.