Introduction
People have always lived in a world of media communication. They can go to various places and span across centuries in the comfort of their own living rooms. Sounds of other cultures can be heard and also the perception of how other people feel about the world experienced. The recognition of other people’s lives in other worlds is now possible. Media is now inseparable from persons’ life (Lawrence et al, pg 3). There have been various reports about the rap songs, violence, pornography and the task of media in the elections. Also in staging the news, latest telecommunication rules, deregulation and also latest technology. Media enables people to bring the world closer to them and shape the world. Communication has become a vital feature of people’s life.
Effects of Media on People’s Lives
In the second part of the 20th century, the western industrial democracies a case in point, has made media to be intertwined with each aspect of people’s reality:
Making it the basic act of the media. That is making money, daily life, implication, recognition, facts, characters and history. This shows that the world of people is of practice. These practices are types of people’s work that modify some features of human reality. People view and use it all the time. Media is categorized according to the geography or in some cases kinds of social links they are meant to construct or prop up. Interpersonal media are basically employed for point-to-point or person-to-person communication. Mass media is fundamentally for communication from a sole point to a huge figure of points. It can also be from a sole source to an audience that constitutes a large crowd of persons. Interpersonal media give the communicator a great deal of power over the audience management. Mass media permits the communicator small authority to select and small likelihood of recognizing the audience (Debord, pg 27).
Mass media tends to divide the sender and the receiver. The interpersonal media comprise of telephone and telegraph. Mass media comprise newspapers, magazines, literature materials, radio, satellite, cable TVs films, records and tapes.
The third group of media is the network one. This can either be applied as interpersonal or mass media. They can also be used to establish latest spatial of social associations that link many points to many points. All these can be senders or receivers. Samples of network media comprising of teleconferencing, postal services, fax, e-mails, World Wide Web and the latest hybrid cellular phones linked to the internet (Debord, pg 48).
Grouping of media according to modalities has a number of samples. One is the modality which is the channel employed in communication and comprises print, electronic and chemical. Another is the sense experience on which a specific media operate and consist of visual, aural, tactile and mixed. Economic modality is vital and consists of directly purchased media, one that can be delivered to an audience with no direct cost and that can charge for accessibility. Media acts as mediator as it creates associations that link previously unconnected persons.
Recognizing the associations between media and authority is center for comprehending the modern society. Media has power to involve, entertain, create, destroy, open or close relationships. Power is the capacity to produce effects and make a variation in the world. TVs have the capacity to reschedule people’s time plans. Magazines have the ability to shape the spaces in which persons live. This power of effect in people’s lives is linked to the idea of determination. Some persons believe that statistical link between education standard and revenue level shows a casual association. Education determines the income to obtain. Also exposure to pornography causes watchers to display certain humiliating stances toward women. It is also responsible for users’ aggressive behavior toward women. Power is also the control over persons and resources. Communication is a procedure through which citizens of a nation forge a common recognition, purpose and resolution. Conflict models assert conflicts and inequalities within the social life and the hardness in the various factions staying together.
This asserts that several resources in the society are unjustly distributed with regard to several systems of social difference. Each society has resources that are overly valued such as force, money, morals, recognitions and political stands. Feminism is a theory of society that asserts unjust distribution of resources by gender and sexuality. Also the subordination of the racial and ethnic factions. This comprises of working-class relative to rich elites and kids to aged relative. The young to middle-aged adults and homosexuals relative to heterosexuals Questions of culture and media communication have been central in the struggles. Such efforts are changing the political and the culture of the world (Lawrence et. al, pg32).
Media has various roles in the society. There are several media historical narratives that explain this. The first one being modification of the society from orality to writing than to print and finally to electronic communication. It is an epochal level assessing the effect of alterations in modes and technology of communication. The second one is the narrative on masses. This focuses on communication, culture and social associations in contemporary life. The final one is that which describes various modifications. That is modification from contemporary to post-contemporary. In oral culture all interactions take place through by face to face verbal. This constitutes a literate society in which the information is shared freely without difficulties. Social associations and norms ought to be a bit rigorously policed in face to face. This is so as there is no recourse to set text of rules of behavior. Oral culture poses an individual and socially engaged form of communication and in the course the form of life. Oral culture is resistant to fundamental alteration although changes with time as stories are passed from one generation to another.
The impacts of written communication are wide. Invention of transportable media permitted centralized control to enlarge over wider regions. Writing alters the association between communicator and the receiver. The listeners now can be isolated in time and space. The prejudice of contemporary civilization accompanying the newspaper and the radio suppose a perspective in deliberation of civilization. This is subjugated by other media. People can become much more humble due to the characters of civilization. Use of medium of communication for quite long time will determine the character of the knowledge be passed on. This suggests that the manipulation will establish a civilization in which life and adjustment will be hard to uphold (Lawrence et al, pg 39).
In written culture, written, set and permanent rules are established. Persons can appeal to and also be held responsible for such rules. Writing aids knowledge to be hoarded as it does not need public performance. Printing has a figure of repercussions. This provided capacity of spending time to produce novel information. Printing acted as an instrument for the promotion of secular society and a body of writing about life that is not religious. Such writers challenged the power of the church on religious and nonreligious issues in favor of personal conscience. Individualization and privatization of print through electronic media reinforce sense of personality and solitude. This establishes novel forms such as what is referred to as global village. Electronic media has changed people’s awareness and conception of time and space (Debord, pg 54).
Mass society theory states that due to several social alterations, involving industrialization, nature of social life and social association changed for worse. Industrialization changed people from rural to urban where now they don’t have their own neighbors as was in the past. People now constitute a society bound by formal contractual associations. A person is now isolated hence susceptible to transformations and oppression. The person is now denied prop up from family, church and community.
Capitalism has altered in this postmodern era. Transnational corporations which are not accountable to any nation ideology have established global markets. Also networks of production globally have been established. New computer technology has been used in all processes of economy. Post contemporary has triggered mass migration of people around the globe and in the process distorts their cultures. Computer and information media are responsible for this most contemporary in the world. Description of the market types has been used by advertisers. A lifestyle cluster represents a section of people who tend to buy and use specific products or make decisions. Such section tends to spend money in same way. In most nations people take the existence of customer society for granted.
The expertise of media in the middle of the previous century had progressed very much and altered many persons who interrelated with art. With the onset of movies and taking photographs, art has been transformed forever. The society at large adores splendor in the media (Benjamin, pg 50). This is applicable to the land when real estate values are highest in various beautiful regions. With the likelihood of manipulating people, emerges the incident of propaganda, which has ever been present for a long period of time. The styles of art can either provide to the principles of the government or be conceptual enough to avoid ill attention from the authorities. The media system is subjugated by an efficiently enthused succession of manifestations that has its grasp on society. The interactions of two people are influenced by how they recognize the world and it is the media that intercedes this insight. TV and Internet access provide enormous amounts of information.
Conclusion
Children mature as they learn about life via the TV and Internet during this information and technology age. For example viewing pornography and sex movies manipulate young people’s opinion of sex till the time they will do the act. What they observe via the media is how sexual indulgence is deliberated. The manifestation of media typifies the current model of social life. Persons’ perceptions on love, demise and warfare develop into what they have viewed from the media. In a society where the manifestation has turned out to be a reality, anything thought to be true is contrived. The media and the manifestation are entrenched in people’s society. This makes the separation of people from the manifestation hard. Contemporary industrial society is based on manifestation in the most basic way. The manifestation holds so much influence as the governing financial class is depicted absolutely by the manifestation (Benjamin, pg 52).
Works cited
Lawrence, Ellen, & Macgregor. Media Making: Mass Media in a Trendy Culture. London: Sage publications, 1992.
Debord, Guy. The Culture of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter. The Effort of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction. Media and Cultural Studies. MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2001.