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The Influence Of Mass Media On American Culture

Decent Essays

With actors dramatizing the reaction of frightening audience members after the “War of World’s” reinforces American’s being terrorized by the radio in 1938. After listening to both broadcasts NPR’s radio lab and the original 1938 broadcast of the “War of World’s” I heard fear in their screams, and concern for children who attended schools leaving me to believe listeners would panic. Contrary to that many disputed questions came to mind. For example, how could the mass media deceive people the way they did? Constant interruptions during broadcasts can have an impact on what the community and even the minds of children understand or believe. In fact, well informed people rely more on personal experiences, prior education, and reasoning but when the media experts get involved they are more likely to convince those who are less informed such as children and people who were born in 1938 being that they were misinformed about the media and broadcasting. The broadcast had told parents to send their children to school with facemasks and a change of clothes, pin pointing what is most important to most of the population. Additionally, the cast would make periodically stops in between incidents allowing listeners to spread the news to others. The …show more content…

The radio station was then burned down leaving six people died. This raises the concern of a situation such as this repeating itself and it did in Buffalo, N.Y. (1968). Some say the reenactment may have occurred because of the human’s natural responses to stories. One of those responses can be emotional contagion. The emotional contagion involves the bandwagon effect, it says that human behavior spreads amongst people in similar ways of trends such as the desire to repeat the incident and the interpretation used to believe it. It covers a large aspect of human behavior like power, strategy, and

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