Mass media is a very powerful tool that helps communicate ideas and information to a larger audience. With the advent of technology and its constant progress, people from all parts of the world gained access to mass media and was able to subscribe to it every minute of the day. The need to communicate later on became more important with the introduction of globalization, where interchange of ideas, products, and certain aspects of culture among nations became necessary as a means to improve economies, environment, and cultures. Now that it is able to reach almost, if not everyone, in the world, its power to create, change, or perpetuate society’s ideas about issues has also increased immensely. A single person’s opinion generated by the media can go viral and influence scores of people from all over the world in a matter of minutes, gather support and at times give birth to a new culture. This modernization of culture is what sociologists refer to as “mediated culture” where media reflects and creates culture (Harcourt 2013). Such is the power of media that implementing regulations is a must to ensure that companies do not exploit media by including political messages and misrepresentations in advertisement and other kind of media message to influence people to behave in certain manners.
Advertisement is one form of mass media that should have regulations due to the influence that it has over humans. We live in a society that is driven by entertainment and information which makes us constantly exposed to advertisements. With it as a daily fixture in our lives, our thoughts, opinions, and behaviours are somewhat influenced. For one, purchasing behaviour can be manipulated by advertising. People rely on the information conveyed by advertisements as a guide in choosing which products and brands to buy. By knowing what to expect and what consumers can get from a certain product, people can compare and get to choose which brand is better. Sometimes, people find themselves buying products that they don’t really need, and although there are other aspects that might have influenced them to do so, factors such as personal, psychological, situational, social, cultural, social classes, families, and reference groups (Anon. 2012), among others, advertisement is one great contributor.
Advertising messages get people into action, buying products that they either need or not, or buying something that they may end up liking or not. This power of advertising towards human behaviour is one reason why there should be regulations imposed on their messages to guarantee that people will be influenced in a positive way. For instance, sports product advertisements for shoes are encouraging people to be more physically active and live a healthier lifestyle. Toothbrush and toothpaste advertisements encourage good oral care, especially among children. These advertisements inspire people to have positive perceptions, a call for everyone to care for themselves. However, advertising messages that attract negative thoughts from consumers can create a big problem in the society. This was illustrated in the late eighties and early nineties, during the hype of university students’ fight for women, gays, lesbians, and ethnic minorities to be recognized and represented in the society.
In an article written by Klein, she points out to media and the curriculum as the perpetrators in the society’s problems. Women, gays, lesbians, and ethnic minorities were stereotyped negatively, and in some instances completely disregarded, in the society, giving them images that somehow stuck until this day. While Asians and lesbians were ignored, women were typecast as helpless and inferior (Klein). A number of advertisements showing women doing household chores and attending to their husbands’ and children’s needs graced magazines, newspapers, and television advertisements. There’s the image of a woman being spanked by her husband for not store-testing Chase and Sanborn Coffee, a vitamin advertisement with the husband praising his wife’s “cute looks” that she acquired from working hard, and a man blowing cigarette smoke on a woman’s face for her to follow him (Galbraith 2012). The examples go on which highlights the reality that advertisement has given women a negative image. Blacks were typecast as violent, the kind of people that have to be avoided as they have the tendency to be vicious. Gays, on the other hand, were labelled as deviants. These stereotyping perpetuated by advertisements influenced people’s behaviour and opinion, inciting them to believe that the mentioned groups of people were the same with how they were portrayed by the media. Even though women and African Americans are now presidents of some of the strongest nations, there are still some who cling on to the mentality induced by advertisements in the past. Not only do negative messages in advertising influence people to think negatively about certain issues, these ideas formed also last.
Advertising messages are usually expressed overtly, but there are undercurrents in advertisements that the public are not really made aware of. In big ways, advertisement is able to twist what is originally a humanitarian cause into an ad campaign that appeals to the consumers’ emotions. Although the sincerity of companies to advance such causes, the turn of events in the advertising trend in the eighties and nineties indicate how the campaign for the recognition and representation of women, gays, lesbians, and ethnic groups was used by advertising companies to successfully promote their products.
The mobile era has hooked people to more information and entertainment wherever and whenever they may be. With the popularity of mobile phones and gadgets, communication became easier. But perhaps this technology’s best gift to mankind is the improbability of getting lost. Thanks to GPS, people now have more confidence to travel even the most remote places as it only takes a few tweaks and programming to get a map of the area of destination. However, attempts to improve these services gave birth to mobile applications that somehow contradicted the original purposes of the invention of mobile devices.
Nowadays, finding restaurants and other places that people need to go to is so much easier. However, mobile applications have also made it possible to locate people. These technologies referred to as location-based services enable mobile users to share their real-time or historical location information online (Tsai, Kelly, Cranor, and Sadeh 2010). Individual benefits from these services include easily locating people that you wish to meet, meet new people that are within the area, get options on which places to go when in a certain area, and other social advances. However, these services also benefit businesses as advertisements for businesses and services nearby are constantly fed to the users. Businesses have a lot to gain from this new method of advertisement as it is easier to lure customers and consumers who are already in the area.
In the article “I Am Here” written by Honan, he described how he got caught in the web of networks and mobile applications and put him to various difficult situations. In one instant, his home address was posted on the social networking site Facebook after signing up to the geosocial application Whrrl. This application cross-post to the microblogging platform Twitter, which in turn is also piped to other places. To deal with the issues of openness, Honan was advised to turn to another application wherein a fake position can be typed in, in essence lying about his actual location. Clearly, if one can input a fake location about a user’s whereabouts, it breaches the purpose of sharing information. Along with the hazards of being too exposed based on the real-time location of a user by unknowingly posting such information on other social networks, this ability to falsify information is one big incentive to regulate media messages and misrepresentations. The original purpose of communicating and establishing social relationship among mobile device users is thwarted by security issues and reliability of information being shared.
With people’s close relationship to television, images and stories portrayed in shows bear a huge influence on viewers’ points of view. People are able to see common life occurrences from different angles, thereby giving a new idea to what most would normally consider mundane. Similarly, television shows are also able to explore issues which are taboo and give them a different twist to make it acceptable to the viewers. Although this may be good to help open people’s minds to issues that are relatively sensitive, this may cause changes in viewers’ values and beliefs.
Messages relayed by television shows should be regulated to avoid developing negative values among its audience. Violence on TV has always been a point of contention among media producers and concerned citizens and organizations. Violent programs on TV lead to aggressive behaviour among children and teenagers (Anon. 1999). A study conducted among African-American males showed the correlation between watching violent TV shows and lower academic performance (Nauert 2008). A large number of studies established the reality of the negative effects of violence on TV on human behaviour, particularly among children. This is the reason why media producers make an effort to temper violent scenes on shows. However, there could only be too many realities in life that can be showcased on TV shows and every once in a while, the boundaries that set good shows from bad are crossed.
The show 24 poses arguments about the presence of torture in its storyline. In the said show, the method of torturing a person in custody suspected of having an involvement with the bomb that is about to hit a populated area in order to gain information on how to stop it is the usual flow of the story. As argued by Cusac in her essay “Watching Torture in Prime Time”, this necessity to brutally torture a suspect in order to save a larger number of innocent people is an unfair competition. It is alarming that torture is being justified by the argument that it is performed to save lives. More alarming is how closely similar the show is to real events in life, events that arouse fear and anxiety among the public. Although this method of closely associating the show’s situations to the real situation of the world is a plus factor for people to easily relate to the show, this move also makes the necessity of torture more real and acceptable in the real world.
The show also shows torture as a practical method to apply to save the world from the devastating effects of getting hit by a bomb for as long as they are torturing the right person. If it happens to be the wrong person, the validity of using that method becomes even more blurred. The post-torture scenes showing the victim lying in a hospital bed while the lead character is seen coolly walking away into the sunset while wearing sunglasses highlights how the discrepancies in the use of torture should be acceptable.
With the various disconcerting issues and arguments posted by the show, the need to regulate political messages contained within TV shows and various forms of mass media becomes even more imperative. Audience should be provided with variety to enforce independent and critical thinking. However, as media has the tendency to twist messages for their own advantage, regulation should be imposed to guarantee that people will be influenced and spurred to take positive actions.
References
Anonymous. 1999. Violence on Television: What do Children Learn? What Can Parents Do?
Web. 9 Nov. 2013. http://www.cmu.edu/CSR/case_studies/tv_violence.html
Anonymous. 2012. Factors That Influence Consumers’ Buying Behavior. Web.
9 Nov. 2013. http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/marketing-principles-v2.0/s06-01-factors-that-influence-consume.html
Cusac, AM. Watching Torture in Primetime.
Galbraith, D. 12 sexist vintage ads. Web. . 9 Nov. 2013.
http://www.oobject.com/category/12-sexist-vintage-ads/
Houghton, M.H. 2013. The Role and Influence of Mass Media. Web. Nov. 2013.
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/sciences/sociology/contemporary-mass-media/the-role-and-influence-of-mass-media
Honan, M. I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle. pp.105-111.
Klein, N. Patriarchy Gets Funky: The Triumph of Identity Marketing.
Nauert, R. 2008. Impact of Television Violence. Web. . 9 Nov. 2013.
http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/10/02/impact-of-television-violence/3050.html
Tsai, J., Kelley, P.G., Cranor, L.F., and Sadeh, N. 2010. Location-Sharing
Technologies: Privacy Risks and Controls. pp.1-4. Web. 9 Nov. 2013.
http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/LBSprivacy/files/TsaiKelleyCranorSadeh_2009.pdf
