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The Media 's Influence On Society

Decent Essays

Everyday we see many images in the media and they suggest what we should be like. While the media says how we should act or look, these suggestions invade people’s thoughts. The images the media portrays make it hard to break out of socially constructed stereotypes in our lives. The media reflects dominate and social values of people’s lives. The media also portrays gender by creating stereotypes and gender roles showing how men, women, and transgenders are seen as deviant. In the media, men are portrayed to be “masculine” while females are shown to be “feminine”. Transgenders are viewed in many negative ways and they are stereotyped. Gender stereotypes are expressed more in mass media because it reaches large audiences. The media can influence people to think that what they see is reality. Most of the time the media shows men to be more dominant than woman. This is a way the media influences people to be someone they aren’t. Many people wonder what the term deviance means. Deviance is created by society and for deviant to take place there are four conditions that would be needed. You need roles, a violator, an audience, and a negative reaction. It states “The degree to which others will respond to a given act as deviant varies greatly” (Becker,20,68). Throughout the semester we learned that something is deviant when it is not accepted by society. A person who conforms to being deviant is breaking rules that society have adapted as a norm. Deviance is established by those

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