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Technology : The Impact Of Technology In America

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In today’s confusing technological society, there is an entirely new ecosystem that has been emerging, and very recently has become a massive influence in the multitudes of ways that we consume media. Electronics are nigh inescapable in our day-to-day lives, from televisions to personal computers to smartphones, radio, and even beyond. Technology has in recent years become one of the most widespread ways that we get the media we want. Because of this, it can be fairly confusing and time-consuming to navigate this new technological ecosystem. Ironically, the pervasiveness of mainstream media can make it difficult to decipher and receive the news that we want to see. In the summer 1972 edition of The Public Opinion Quarterly, Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, at the time professors at the University of North Carolina, released a study on the effect of media on the individual consumer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They conducted one-hundred interviews during the 1968 presidential election, and “attempted to match what Chapel Hill voters said were key issues of the campaign with the actual content of the mass media used during the campaign” (McCombs and Shaw 177). The two university associate professors used a filter question to select the the interviewees from many randomly selected registered voters in Chapel Hill. The filter question narrowed this large number of people down to only one-hundred participants for the interviews. The question was to determine

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