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Media and its effects on society
Short essay:Steve Jobs in the economic and social role
Media and its effects on society
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Carl Bernstein states “We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.” Bernstein’s statement is outdated. Our culture is not in the process becoming an idiot culture, it already is. Modern journalists, which I believe should not even be called journalists have robbed the meaning and nobility of what is to be a journalist. And news networks are no longer performing the news but giving us biased perspectives and not facts about events that promote awareness and …show more content…
In one of my favorite shows Mr. Robot, the protagonist is asked “What is it about society that disappoints you so much?” He responds with “I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself just one big hoax, spamming each other with our burning commentary bullshit, masquerading this insight; our social media faking this intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new, we all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck society.” In other words, the people that we revere are fake because the media only shows the side that we are interested in. Like in the ancient Roman world, gladiators were revered even though they were butchering each other in public. The only difference between now and then is that instead of killing we have lunacy and shallowness. We love to see celebrities’ breakdown and sex scandals. Our value is set by celebrities by how they live and what they wear. We climb the ladder of nonsense to reach an illusion of fulfillment while creating a bigger gap from the real
In his editorial "Words Triumph Over Images," Curtis Wilkie blames today’s media for being “reckless” and “a mutant reality show”. He believes that television and radio are “unfiltered”, which causes the quality of journalism for newspapers to be unmatched. Yet, it is unfair to label all media that is not print as lesser because the quality of any media relies on the viewers and the individual journalists, and in drastic situations like a hurricane, reporters may have many road blocks. Any of these aspects can affect the quality of journalism, which invalidates Curtis Wilkie’s claim.
Has the modernization of the twentieth century made us smarter or has it hindered our brains to think in 140 characters or less? In the article, “Brain Candy”, Steven Johnson argues that the “steady upward trajectory” in global I.Q scores is due to what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture. However, this romantic critic is too rooted in his technology- age ideology. While Johnson claims that everything bad is good for us, family themed-programing is being replaced by fabricated reality television shows and channels specialized in selling, video games are hindering our reading and writing skills, and books are becoming things of the past. Johnson insists that popular culture is making us smarter, but is stupid the new smart?
It is not uncommon to hear people complaining about what they hear on the news. Everyone knows it and the media themselves knows it as well. Some of the most renowned journalists have even covered the the media’s issues in detail. Biased news outlets have flooded everyday news. We find that journalism’s greatest problems lie in the media’s inability for unbiased reporting, the tendency to use the ignorance of their audience to create a story, and their struggles to maintain relevance.
Self-motivation and determination are two of the main ideals of being journalist. If a journalist does not have the desire to find and report a story, he has no career. A journalist depends on finding the facts, getting to the bottom of the story and reporting to the public, whether it’s positive or negative. Janet Malcom states in the book The Journalist and the Murderer, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” (Malcolm, 3) Her starting words speak volumes about “the Journalist and the Murderer” and the lessons that can be learned.
Part of that is because some people’s perspectives of celebrities allow them think as if they’re on a pedestal and are more important than the average human. When people vision these celebrities as these quintessential people it enable’s their own thoughts and opinions on the celebrity. It’s like brainwashing, these celebrities only show the media what they want, which allows them to put up a whole façade and mask who they truly are. During the O.J Simpson trial it opened more people’s minds to visualize the concept that celebrities have the ability to be just as deranged as the average person, and that we are all equal, but the only difference that’s separates us is the fact that their job is in the lime
I was first introduced to the band Green Day when I listened to their song “Good Riddance” on their album Warning when it was released in 1997. I continued to listen to Green Day’s music throughout my teenage years after they released their next two albums, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. When I was young I enjoyed Green Day’s music because it was fun to listen and sing along with, but as I grew older and actually started interpreting the lyrics of their songs I realized that there was a deeper message to their music. Many of my friends also commented on the motive behind Green Day’s music, and this led us to long-winded discussions about government and politics. We didn’t fully comprehend what we were talking about, but it was obvious that their music had provoked interesting emotions in us. Green Day’s often controversial punk-rock was so influential that it sent a media-influenced generation looking for answers to the meaning behind their politically-charged lyrics in their albums American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown even years later.
As celebrities stand distinctively among the masses and cast out their halos of personality charm and strong suits of skilled abilities, the controversies about them are unavoidable shadows created from their fame. With the popularization of celebrity culture, information synchronization, and communication technology, their lives are publicly exposed and various forms of media (depending on eras) record their flaws. Tough information transmitted to audiences are frequently biased, evidences of objective reality remains, even in the remote past.
Pop culture can be described as a wide range of mediums that are deemed acceptable and popular by society. Films, namely Walt Disney films being a clear example of a pop culture outlet that has a positive influence on society. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of pop culture and society, they state that mass produced entertainment serves to shelter their broad audience to the harsh realities of their lives. That the culture industry offers a deceitful escape and a freedom from thinking. They further argue that mass produced entertainment suffers because it aims to please a broad audience. The critique states, “Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval
The American culture has changed so much in the last10 years. People’s moral values are below normal standards, and the older generation is outraged and distributed by the way things are being handling in today’s society. In Chapter 1, Wilson defined popular culture as “the culture of everyone in a society, and the customs and practices handed down from generation to generation” (Wilson, 2001).
Cultural intelligence is quickly becoming the focus for companies looking to diversify into the global market. When focusing on a business strategy, maintaining the conceptual mindset of business as a mission (BAM) is crucial, not only for increasing the company’s success, but individual leaders within the business (Tunehag, 2008). One of the strategies to focus on while improving an approach of BAM is the concept of cultural intelligence. Furthermore, individuals capable of self-study and improvement will begin to see an increase for their company, as well as, God’s kingdom when their focus is in alignment with the teaching of the Holy Bible.
Movie stars. They are celebrated. They are perfect. They are larger than life. The ideas that we have formed in our minds centered on the stars that we idolize make these people seem inhuman. We know everything about them and we know nothing about them; it is this conflicting concept that leaves audiences thirsty for a drink of insight into the lifestyles of the icons that dominate movie theater screens across the nation. This fascination and desire for connection with celebrities whom we have never met stems from a concept elaborated on by Richard Dyer. He speculates about stardom in terms of appearances; those that are representations of reality, and those that are manufactured constructs. Stardom is a result of these appearances—we actually know nothing about them beyond what we see and hear from the information presented to us. The media’s construction of stars encourages us to question these appearances in terms of “really”—what is that actor really like (Dyer, 2)? This enduring query is what keeps audiences coming back for more, in an attempt to decipher which construction of a star is “real”. Is it the character he played in his most recent film? Is it the version of him that graced the latest tabloid cover? Is it a hidden self that we do not know about? Each of these varied and fluctuating presentations of stars that we are forced to analyze create different meanings and effects that frame audience’s opinions about a star and ignite cultural conversations.
This article focuses on research that reveals the de-professionalization and democratization of traditional journalism. The article explores the consequences of both the relation between traditional journalism and citizen journalism. The author argues that the emergence of citizen journalism is a consequence of the current factors effecting the changes in traditional journalism. The lines between professional journalism content and amateur journalism content have become blurred. The author explains how these factors have shown to affect the field of journalism in areas of employment, media technologies, shifting patterns of media use, and media consumption.
“Power is the ability to define reality and to have other people respond to your definition as if it were their own (Nobles).” People fail to see responsible journalism as a crisis because it is so convenient to have news media make up your mind for you. The foundation of our personal philosophies stems from irresponsible journalism through the major news sources we consume, the exposure to less responsible entertainment, and the biased reporting enforcing negative stereotypes.
Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change” (John Podhoretz). It encompasses the advertisements we see on T.V, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and it’s the reason Leonardo DiCaprio has not won an Oscar yet. It defines and dictates the desires and fears of the mainstream members of society and it is so ingrained into our lives that it has become as natural as breathing. Moreover, adults never even bat an eyelash at all the pop culture and advertising that surrounds them since it has become just another part of everyday life. Pop culture is still somewhat seen as entertainment enjoyed by the lower class members of society but pop culture standards change over time.
McLoed and Hawley (as cited in Wilson, 1995) elucidated appropriately, "a recurrent journalistic controversy has involved the question whether journalism is a true profession or merely a craft." Sparked primarily by Lippmann and Dewey, extending into the age of the penny press (mid 1980s) and later, the attempt to commercialise the news (late 1980s) to our present era, there has existed a contentious debate on journalism being distinguished as a profession (Wilson, 1995). Encapsulated in a democratic homeland since the advent of time, media systems are habitually acclaimed as the “fourth power,” with its journalists often hailed as the “watch-dogs” of such a society. Lending itself to act as ‘gatekeeper’ for the wider society and performing the traditional role of journalism, the media (overall) exist as powerful “instruments of knowledge” that perform the function of providing information to the masses in a public sphere, where issues may be discussed, justified and contested (Scannell, 1995, p. 17). Evidently, media workers play a pivotal role in our society; however, their status in the realm of professions is not definite.