1f25 Blog response1: Media Impact on Others

Sifting through blog posts has left me a little weary, but in the end it has almost perfectly mirrored something that seems to be a common issue among my fellow students, the vastness and the inconsistencies of media.

It seemed to be fairly common among people to say that mass media is a significant influence on their world views, just simply due to the sheer size of the media  and its many potential outlets.  Korrina Charette (lookingformargo.wordpress.com) summed this idea up nicely when she said “In today’s world, we are bombarded with media from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, whether it be on the internet, the television, or any other form of technology.” The idea that in our society we have constant access to various forms of media is an intriguing idea, in that people are able to get answers (whether they be accurate or false) instantaneously.

Marilyn Lopez (mlsthoughts.wordpress.com) makes the point “Mass media has made it so that every answer to any question is at your fingertips, no need to use your long term memory to store information.” These ideas lead me to believe that my view on mass media may have been too specific. Where I focused on only the seeking out of knowledge, they showed an interesting side mine lacked. Which is that mass media changes my understanding of research and information, on which I rely for my world view.

Korrina Charette also mentions that people are immediately connected to facebook, twitter, tumblr, and any other kind of social media.  The thing that I find troubling about social media is the amount of people and the amount of information that is spread through it. We have all this information at our fingertips, at all times, yet through social media we are not exposed to all of the information. We are exposed to the information shared by our peers, though it may be false or lacking in all the information about the subject, or simply biased. Alexandra Towne (allietowne1613.wordpress.com) said “We all need to make informed decisions about what we see and hear within the media because the media is not always trustworthy when it comes to the facts.” This quote is more along the line of my original argument, that it does not matter what you look up, as much as it matters how you look up and how you think about the material presented to you.

 After looking over these blogs I think it would be fair to say that our understanding of knowledge and information is based off of this access to all material and the vastness of the material. Due to this vastness there are going to be many inconsistencies in the data presented to us, but that alone should not deter critical thought and an attempt to understand the material fully. The fact that people get news and information from social media just means that people should be even more critical of the information they see, and they should go and seek the whole story.

My searching through blogs has lead me to a fuller understanding of mass media’s effect on the mind set of people, which is a rather poetic way to finish an assignment about the effects of media on my worldview.