How media affects us

Media affects everyone's life that comes into contact with it. There are many disadvantages and advantages to media and advertising. This essay will talk about the advantages and disadvantages evolving around the media. A few advantages that this essay will talk about is that media can target a global audience as they can reach out to us and that it can be used for educational purposes to help people learn all around the world. A few disadvantages are that it can be manipulated very easily and that it can easily tell us exactly what to want, what to wear, how to think, taking away our freedom.

An advantage is that the media and advertising can reach a global audience, informing anyone, anywhere and anytime. Most people read or see advertising and media on the internet, which is mostly accessible to a large audience, allowing more and more people to be exposed to it. This can be useful as it can inform a lot of people around the country and world if there is a disaster, allowing them to give aid to the unfortunate victims. For example, the typhoon in the Philippines that happened mid-2013 and the mega earthquake in Japan were able to show images, videos and stories to people in other countries that otherwise have known nothing about it and would not have been able to help.

A disadvantage of media and advertising however, is that the media and be manipulated extremely easily. For example, if you look to the right you can see an example of this. It is just one image, yet can give the audience a very different viewpoint. From one side it looks like they are giving aid and water to a poor man and on the other it looks as if they are going to kill him or take him as hostage. Another example of this would be in magazines that are trying to sell. Some might write about a couple’s night out as a lovely story, whilst another might write about how they were fighting the whole time. They will usually just write a story that will grab the reader’s attention.