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Does the Media Shape Who We Are?

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Introduction

The Mass Media is an important feature of modern society; its development has undoubtedly been a core factor to rapid social and technological change and also to the rise in personal income and standard of life as well as the decline of some social traditions. Mass media can be defined as venues for messages that are created for consumption by large numbers of people. It is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state.

The degree to which the mass media has influenced society today has been (and still is) debated upon for decades. It can be argued that the mass media is used as “an instrument”, both more powerful and …show more content…

The school proposed the hypodermic model of effects. This envisaged the media as a hypodermic syringe that injected the audience with its contents like a drug making them acceptable to the attitudes, opinions and beliefs expressed by the medium about the decisions that they make.

‘The image of mass communication process entertained by researchers had been, firstly, one of “an atomistic mass” of millions of readers, listeners and movie goers, prepared to receive the message; and secondly…every message [was conceived of] as a direct and powerful stimulus to action which would elicit immediate response.’- Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955)

The Inoculation Model

Another theory similar to the last is the Inoculation model, a long term model that is based upon the idea that if we are continuously exposed to certain images, we then become immune to them. This was an argument used in the Jamie Bulger case in which two teenage boys were said to have been obsessed with and therefore influenced by the film Child’s Play 3 and thus drove them to carry out a horrific crime on the toddler.

Television violence has been a hot topic in recent years especially the effects it has on young people. As a result there are censorship guidelines notably in the aim not to influence the minds of the young. For example, in America certain sketches of the animated comedy The Simpsons are censored. It is not evenhanded to say

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