“Your mind is being controlled by distant strangers who don’t have your best interests at heart.”
This quote from the article, Mind Control: It’s Happening to You Right Now, summarizes how the media affects our minds and holds power over our thoughts.
Since the early 2000s, technology has majorly developed and transformed the media.
From controlling our searches to creating standards we must meet, the media has influenced us in ways we never imagined it could.
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Influences of the Media
With information surrounding us, media affects what we buy, what we read, and how we think.
Controlled Searches
It has recently been discovered that each individual person’s internet searches generate results based on that individual’s resent internet activity.
This personalizes the internet to each individual’s likes, dislikes, and things related to their previous searches.
Although in theory this sounds like a useful tool to finding things you’d like, it also has the negative aspect of allowing you to not be exposed to new things.
Surfing the internet can lead to new discoveries and new interests. Having a server narrow down what you see to what you like is limited the ability to discover new things and influences you to think and live like you always had.
Standards
The media has set a particular standard in how people should look, act, talk, and dress. Because of the media’s influence, many people are convinced to believe they have to fit in with the media’s expectations.
Glamour magazine wrote an article covering the topic and shared this statistic: “Women wrote more than 5 million negative tweets in 2014. Four out of every five negative beauty tweets from women were about themselves.”
These standards have no positive aspects; degrading people who don’t fit in these standards and making some people insecure and believe they have to change.
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Advertising
The most profitable and influencial aspect of media is advertisements.
Companies will pay almost anything to have celebrities or well-known websites show and support their product. And through influences of the media, these sales tactics work.
Many people buy products depending on who advertises them. The people of today feel so pressured to ‘fit in’ to the media’s standards that if someone successful uses the product, they feel they must also use the product.
This method of influence by the media has worked on myself as well. There have been many times where I’ve seen a celebrity I like endorse a product and immediately gone out and bought the same product.
Tomorrow’s Media
There is no telling how the media will influence our future.
It is our responsibility to be aware of the influential tactics used by the media so we keep in mind how important it is to think for ourselves.
At the end of the day, our future is what we make it; not what the media controls.
Puddin Skwad 