Are Media Good or Bad?

Media are devices used for moving information through time or space. They link the sender to the receiver. And when a message is sent to a certain receiver or audience, this receiver will eventually interpret its meaning. There fore, as a result, the audience will be influenced and will change in a certain way. In fact, influence refers to the way in which the mass media, in all their forms (television, books, films, etc…) affect the way we, as audience behave and act in our society and in our every day lives.

Depending in the circumstances, mass media can influence people's beliefs, opinions, and attitudes, and change their thinking about public issue and especially political issues and preferences. Media can have a positive effect on us. And it can also influence us negatively.

Media gives us the chance to enrich and educate ourselves. For example, we can read articles in some news papers about prehistoric ages, or even, we can read a certain book in order to a culture ourselves. There fore, media is a useful form of communication with which a person can be guided more and can turn into a better someone. In fact, media let us be informed about new products, issues or even services that we already ignore or we vaguely know about. We can take for example the news on TV informing us what is
Page 2 going on in the world day by day. Media is also considered as an entertainment, especially through the performances of acting, music and sports, along with reading sometimes, and video or computer games. So, media are a big benefit for us. In fact we can communicate with people around the world in a faster, cheaper, efficient, and effective way. It can provide us with information just in a couple of minutes on the internet. And the media has a great power to influence people because it can spread a message instantly. Media can also change people's actions by influencing them to buy something, to donate, to dress differently, or even to change their minds about smoking for example.

If we analyze this issue at a wider level, which means at a social or collective level, mass media can influence and change a whole culture. And there is an obvious example describing this fact, and it is language and its shared understandings. Well, media is evolving with time, and it is introductory new words and meanings to the language, just like slang.

However, media have influences that can be seen negatively. It can encourage society or a certain categories of people, to act unconsciously and behave negatively. Some think that rock music can encourage some young people to use drugs, to be engaged in unsafe sex, or even adopt Satanism.

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So when people are exposed to the content of media, they can be influenced and changed in many significant ways. More over, we can say that there is a certain correlation between watching television and maladaptive behavior. Because, when children are heavily exposed to violence, they directly mimic what they had seen on tv. For example, some children try to jump out of the window then they want to act like superman. Even adults can be negatively influenced by the media because lots of crimes were committed after watching horror movies or after trying to copy the crime in the film.

So, the media can be manipulative most of the time because they can change our minds the way they would like to. Plus, some people use the manipulative media in order to benefit from it and from the audience. They can change our opinion about preferring a certain political party over another.

Therefore, we can say that the media have a large influence on society as a whole, and that they effectively manipulate and create false perceptions to further their own financial objectives.

To conclude, we can say that there is a media controversy. In fact, on the first hand, elements of media are very useful, informative, entertaining and educative, and on the other hand, these same elements include violence, political opinion, references to fascist regimes, profanity, sexuality, nudity, capital punishment, horror, and drug abuse.