Media has been growing for a numerous amount of years, and it will only keep rising. You could say that nearly everyone around you has some sort of technological device or way in which they can access the media, these are what we call print, audio visual and on-line media. Print media includes things such as newspapers, magazines and even books, Audio visual media includes your TV, radio or even music and finally on-line media is mostly photos or videos that are spread over the internet. With the media we are able to see what is going on around the world through a computer or TV screen without actually being there, thus we can all share knowledge within our cultures.
Each of these pieces of media will have some sort of impact on an individual’s life whether that be watching the news or listening to a certain type of music but the ways that this can influence someone can differ through their cultural identity.
Sender, Message and Receiver (S-M-R) is a model for communication that starts with a producer, the message that they publish into society and the views that people get from that message. Sender is the starting point of this model, whereby you look at who owns certain aspects of the media and what their interests are. Global Media ownership are bigger corporations such as Disney and Time Warner, these big companies own most of the TV channels and films that we watch for example, Disney owns ABC and Marvel Studios so you can see that they might want to bring one message across through multiple ways in TV channels and movies, yet we don’t even release that we are being influenced by that certain company and we then go out into society influenced by aspects and bringing this into our own cultures.
Message is the 2nd part of this model and it is the message that the media is trying to bring across to society, this can be through symbols and signs an example of this are films and the information they are trying to bring across. Within films, signs and symbols can be landscapes or even the feeling that a certain movie gives the audience, this then interprets the receiving end that the audience gets in the final stage of this model. The audience will receive the message that the sender sent whether that is through a film, newspaper or TV show, once again influencing them to an extent.
Media both imposes a negative and positive effect on people within their society and culture, most of the negative impacts in which media can be influences that we don’t release are even being publicised in a certain way as it is our everyday way of living, for example gender representation. If we look at this from C. Wright Mills view on the sociological imagination we can see that both male and female has a certain role within society that is in some way influenced by the media.
In 1960-70’s a feminist movement labelled, ‘American Feminist movement’ argued that American women, “Was expected to follow one path: to marry in her early 20s, start a family and devote her life to homemaking.”
This movement was big in the 1960-70’s but if we look at it in more depth we find that the media didn’t publicise a lot about it. The means of what we know now is through information passed down through generation.
“The idea of women participating as a united force in April 24th demonstration was first discussed at a women’s workshop at the NPAC Emergency Anti-war conference in December where over 150 people met”
A flyer that the feminist movement published shows that a lot of women attended this event on April 24th for the march against the war and yet the only information that I could find on this specific movement was from this source, the overall view of this flyer is a positive one as the whole protest was a peaceful atmosphere and still the media decided not to make awareness of this movement even though the main goal of women attending was to make a stand and play a role in the Anti-war protest.
“The press and media imply that the anti-war movement is lead entirely by men. This is a misconception that must that must be corrected.”
Men along with women in the 1960’s were also stereotyped into a certain gender role within society. We could say that the role of a man was to get money and provide for the family and the media had a huge part to play in how this was portrayed telling people how they should act and think. If we take a children’s show and look at it in more depth we come to release that even they are influencing kids and almost socialising them into a certain gender role from a young age which isn’t that different to TV shows intended for older audiences.
Children as they grow, learn by their surroundings so if a TV show is telling a child that the mother stays at home while the father goes out working, or that men are meant to be more masculine while females are seen as weaker and attractive i.e. princesses and the perfect body type, then they will grow up to think in that way.
“Feminist researchers have demonstrated how cultural and media products aimed at young audiences embody stereotypical gendered representations of girls and boys and their expected ambitions.” (Giddens)
With there being a few downfalls of the children’s TV shows we can also see that kids can benefit from the media, for example when they see someone of the TV being kind, they might want to do the same, influencing them and allowing them to become better people that are going out into society and joining their culture.
Debbie Gings article, ‘A manual on masculinity’ is based upon her findings of boys and stereotyping their masculinity during their teenage years. The bases of her research questions whether media has an influence on a man’s masculinity, her examples of this are sources like films and video games i.e. Family Guy, Jackass, Grand Theft Auto and Resident Evil. Each of these sources Ging argues influence teenage boys on violence and also overstress the importance of gender roles.
When talking to the boys she found that ‘87 percent said that they talked about TV to their friends’ while, ’93 percent talked about films to their classmates’ but also through quantitative research this started to affect boys and how they socialise in within these friend groups, the boys stated that they can “be themselves” with close friends that they hang about with often whereas in large groups they couldn’t and had to show a more masculine side.
“This focus on men and masculinity has challenged the hitherto invisibility not only of male power and privilege but also of male suffering and anxiety, and it is primarily in the media that these new and often contradictory discourses on masculinity are being articulated and (re)negotiated.”
Adults TV shows mostly advertise women as sexual objects for men to gaze upon through the media, people will then go out into society with that frame of mind and this can then start issues like rape culture, but as society has grown also has the empowerment of women.
In modern culture some women have become an icon to inspire others, this changed the way people see women by using their attractiveness and becoming sexually powerful. Looking at the media we can see how the power of women has changed over time through celebrities and role models that young kids and even adults look up to.
“Such that rather than being presented as passive objects of the male gaze, young women in adverts are now frequently depicted as active, independent and sexually powerful.”
The media can also blow things out if proportion, when we look at some historical events and delve into more information about it we find that it wasn’t as big as the media make it out to be, this is called a moral panic. One of the most common and well known moral panics are the Mods and Rockers, this was an event in which the media started labelling 2 groups of people and publishing stories about violence between them. This then influences people to believe that this is what these groups are like, therefore the more they see of these groups together, the more stories they will report resulting in a bigger panic than there ever was.
Stan Cohen was a sociologist who wrote a book on ‘Folk Devils and Morals Panics’ when looking through this you can see that most of the stories in which the media published weren’t the exact representation of what happened and although there were fights between them, the media and press exaggerated most of the events.
“The mods and rockers have been distinctive in being identified not just in terms of particular events or particular disapproved forms of behaviour (such as drug taking and violence) but as distinguishable social types.” (Cohen)
Frankfurt school is a group of individuals who believe that Marxism is missing a crucial element which is culture and the part it plays in the theory. They state that we have a “culture industry” whereby culture is produced. With media they believe that the culture industry has a negative impact on how we think as we are being influenced by the media. Along with this we are all easily manipulated into having certain thoughts and most of the information that we receive is false (not authentic). I agree with the most part of this theory, as I have stated before it is hard for people to go about their daily lives without some source of media and I think that they do take advantage of this by exaggerating and giving us ‘false information’, influencing us to think a certain way but as the media has grown it has developed into optimistic information, giving us more free will and control over our own views of society we live in and its cultures.
“The members of Frankfurt school argued that leisure time had effectively been industrialised. Their extensive studies of the ‘culture industry’ – such as the entertainment industries of film, TV, popular music, radio, newspapers and magazines – have been very influential in the field.”
From all of these facts we could state that media has an impact on our culture through with what they can publicise, there are both advantages and disadvantages to the media, since we all have some way of gaining access to the media, it is easier for sources such as the TV or the internet to influence us or provide us with information that they want us to see, as it is our only means of getting this knowledge unless it is passed down through history by people. Through the Frankfurt school and different views on gender roles we could argue that media affects us without even knowing and this information can then affect different people cultures and how they then act within society, it might also change people’s views on different aspects such as age as people might get a different perspective on groups of people which you can see from the Mods and Rockers, along with more respect for women and even men as the years pass.