Media effects on society

Mass media’s effects impact society in a variety of ways, through their lifestyles, attitudes, culture, and/or behaviors. Lifestyle effects reflect how a person is socialized into society from a very young age with TV being the main source of media communication in a child’s life. TV serves as a socialization tool to expose them to other influential factors they normally wouldn’t learn about from family and friends at this young age. Critics claim that this influence from TV is taking away a child’s innocence at a young age. Attitude effects reflect how mass media impacts public opinion and how it can be manipulated to reflect the current mass sentiment with the use of stereotyping. Mass media uses stereotyping to create an image in the viewer’s mind quickly and without a lot of words. Also with the use of role modeling, attitudes can be influenced by imitating desirable behaviors. The cultural effects reflect how mass media influences society by the use of historical and contemporary transmission. Where learned values are passed on through the generations as the historical component and other cultures are influenced by our culture as the contemporary component. The behavioral mass media effects on society are through motivational and subliminal messages. These effects use manipulative advertising that acts upon people’s hidden motivations to influence them as well as sending subliminal messages to mass audiences that cannot be consciously perceived. In this case people are influenced to buy their product or use their service without being aware of their motivation to do so. So, mass media can influence people’s decisions in many ways, through socialization, stereotyping, role modeling, historical and contemporary transmissions as well as through motivational and subliminal messages.