multimedia today essay

21 Multimedia Examples

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

Multimedia refers to media that combine multiple means of communication. Elements that could be combined include images, text, sound, animation, video, and even interactive elements.

The rise of multimedia in the past 70 years has helped us to develop more engaging and entertaining texts across mediums such as television and virtual reality.

And in the digital era, we’re increasingly capable of using interactive multimedia, allowing people to ‘choose their own adventure’ and give immediate feedback that can help shape their media experience.

But we can also reflect on very old forms of multimedia, such as plays, dance, and theater, where body language, costumes, and spoken scripts have combined to create immersive experiences.

Multimedia Examples

1. television.

Modes of Communication: Image, Video, Audio, Text

Television represents one of the earliest and most significant uses of multimedia.

It involves the amalgamation of audio and visual content, which surely would have been ground-breaking when it first came out, replacing radio as the premium medium of communications.

TV brought to viewers’ homes a wide array of programming, from news bulletins to sitcoms, documentaries, and movies. Different graphical elements like subtitles and closed captions also add to the multimedia integration, providing more accessibility to TV content.

Television’s use of multimedia has significantly influenced how information and entertainment are disseminated and received.

Cinema takes multimedia to another dimension, combining powerful audio and rich, high-definition visuals to narrate stories.

The multimodality of cinema started in the early 1900, with silent black-and-white films, where the second medium was often someone playing the piano in the theater.

Cinema has innovatively adopted technology to add sound, color, and eventually 3D imaging to its toolkit. Sound effects and music supplement dialogue and visual cues, shaping the mood and pacing of the narrative.

Combined, these elements engross audiences in a uniquely stimulating experience, embodying the essence of multimedia storytelling.

3. Video Games

Modes of Communication: Image, Video, Audio, Interactive, Text

Video games are a prime example of modern multimedia, leveraging text, images, sound, and interactive components to create captivating virtual, often 3D, worlds.

Brief text instructions often guide gameplay, while the on-screen graphics design the game’s aesthetics and dynamics. Soundtracks and sound effects add another layer of interaction, enhancing the atmospheric immersion.

Moreover, feedback systems and communication tools allow players to interact with the game and each other, sculpting video games into a comprehensive multimedia platform.

4. Interactive Websites

Interactive websites, like the one you’re on right now, marry text, images, audio, video, and interactive elements to offer a dynamic user interface.

Text serves to provide information, while images and videos supplement and illustrate this data in another format. Some websites will also utilize audio components for better communication and user interaction, such as by embedding a YouTube video.

The user’s inputs and clicks trigger responses from the site, such as opening a new page, showing a pop-up, or playing a video, substantiating the interactive aspect of the medium.

5. E-Learning Platforms

E-Learning platforms have brought learning to the digital-multimodal era , allowing users to engage with educational material through text, videos, and interactive quizzes online.

On these apps, text provides background knowledge for learners, while videos usually supplement this information with visual explanations.

When it comes to assessment, interactive quizzes are designed for users to test their understanding of the material instantly, offering a comprehensive, interactive learning experience.

Furthermore, such platforms often adjust (making the content easier and harder) depending on how well students have answered the questions, helping them to learn as effectively as possible.

6. Virtual Reality Games

Virtual Reality (VR) games provide an immersive multimedia experience using a combination of visuals, audio, and haptic feedback.

These games transpose players into a digital landscape where they can interact with the environment and objects within it, in real-time, using VR equipment.

Simultaneously, the audio elements conceive an aural ambiance that bolsters the overall gaming experience, heightening the emotive depth augmented by the game.

Consequently, Virtual Reality games offer an elaborate multisensory engagement, thereby pushing the frontiers of multimedia application in gaming.

7. Graphic Novels

Modes of Communication: Image, Text

Graphic novels have been around for over 100 years, and demonstrate the power of incorporating both text and visuals in storytelling – which is especially engaging for children.

Full-color panels of artwork illustrate the narrative and convey emotions, while the dialogue and captions in the text provide context and drive the plot.

Through the synergy of text and images, graphic novels offer an immersive reading experience that captivates readers by visually transporting them into the world of the story.

8. Interactive Kiosks

Modes of Communication: Image, Video, Audio, Interactive, Haptics, Text

Interactive kiosks at museums and trade shows have helped bring multimedia texts to traditional spaces.

These kiosks present users with both auditory and visual information through videos, images, and audio narration.

To add an interactive element, they often include touch screens or buttons that allow users to navigate the content at their own pace. This combination offers an engaging, user-friendly information delivery system that is accessible to a vast array of audiences.

9. Digital Marketing Ads

Digital marketing ads, such as those that you may see on this page right now, are demonstrate how multimedia is leveraged in the advertising industry to catch people’s attention and drive sales.

A succinct, yet powerful combination of text, audio, and video elements are employed by skilled advertising professionals to convey a brand’s message and sell products.

The text component often detail the benefits of a product or service, while embellishing pictures and videos visually depict these advantages, making them easier for potential customers to see themselves using the products. Paired with compelling audio – usually music or voice-over – these ads aim to build a strong emotional connection with the viewer, encouraging a subsequent conversion.

10. Mobile Apps

Mobile apps are at the forefront of multimedia use in this century. They usually combine text, images, videos, and sometimes also include interactive features.

For example, a fitness app might use text to describe a workout routine, videos to show the correct way to perform each exercise, and audio to provide motivational music or feedback during the workout.

The interactive features of such applications could include input fields for recording progress, thereby making them a perfect example of how various forms of media can be integrated to offer an engaging and convenient user interface.

11. Online Newspapers

Online newspapers mark a significant advancement in the media industry, leveraging multimedia to present news in a more captivating manner.

Articles are typically written in text format and supplemented with photographs or infographics for visual emphasis. Video and audio recordings are often embedded to provide first-hand information and a degree of authenticity, as well as to enhance the user’s information-gathering experience.

Furthermore, online newspapers often include interactive elements such as polls, quizzes, and comment sections that encourage reader participation.

12. Music Streaming Platforms

Modes of Communication: Video, Audio

Music streaming platforms have increasingly embraced multimedia in recent decades. Besides audio content, these platforms often feature album art images, lyrics displayed in sync with the music, and artist bios or related news articles for additional context.

User engagement is also elevated with features like customization of playlists, sharing of favorite songs, and the inclusion of video content for certain tracks.

The conglomerate of these multimedia elements allows for a holistic music experience catered to variegated user preferences.

13. Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms significantly utilize multimedia to facilitate interaction, engagement, and content creation.

They incorporate text, images, video, and audio features, allowing users to consume and create diverse content.

For instance, an Instagram post can have a photo or video with a caption, hashtags, and an option for other viewers to leave comments. Instagram stories, further engage users with interactive features such as polls, music tracks, and question boxes.

This sort of integration of multiple media formats helps maintain user interest and promotes active participation.

14. Webinars

Primarily video-based, webinars offer real-time, interactive presentations, workshops, or lectures over the internet.

Text aids, such as subtitles or on-screen prompts, often complement the verbal communication .

Additionally, interactive elements like polls, Q&A sessions, and live chats provide an interactive platform for audience engagement, thus enhancing the learning or discussion experience.

The combination of these different media forms ensures Webinars are informative, engaging, and broadly accessible.

15. Digital Signage

Modes of Communication: Image, Video, Text

Digital signage is far more catchy and engaging than the old static boards that used to line highways.

The digitization of signs revolutionized advertising and public information, making them more catchy and engaging.

Typically, they loop a series of images, videos, and text, providing broad flexibility in the type and variation of information presented. Sound might be employed depending on the location and objective of the signage.

Additionally, some signage incorporates interactive aspects, such as touch screens or gesture recognition, boosting user engagement.

From malls to airports, digital signage illustrates multimedia’s far-reaching impact in the public domain.

16. Video Conferencing Tools

Video conferencing tools incorporate multimedia formats to enable real-time interaction amongst remote parties.

They utilize video and audio elements for direct communication, establishing a virtual meeting environment that closely parallels a physical setting.

Textual components can be integrated via chat boxes, screen sharing, and document sharing, while the interactive features, such as the raise-hand function or reactions, promote engaging and orderly discussions.

These tools exemplify how multimedia can effectively bridge physical distance and facilitate collaboration between dispersed teams.

17. Interactive Whiteboards

Modes of Communication: Image, Video, Audio, Interactive, Text, Haptics

Found primarily in classrooms and corporate meeting rooms, interactive whiteboards heavily leverage multimedia to boost collaboration and engagement.

They combine visuals, text, and audio through the presentation of information on a touch-sensitive screen. Users can write text digitally, draw diagrams, or display videos and images, while the interactive features allow for document editing, erasing, and moving elements around on the screen.

IWBs are excellent for teaching younger students, who can come up and touch the board, drag elements, and write on the board, to make learning more active.

18. In-Car GPS

In-Car GPS devices might not be your first form of multimedia that comes to mind, but the combination of the on-screen moving map and the instructions from the AI voice make it multimodal.

Textual elements are also used for listing road names or travel durations. The interactive feature allows drivers to input their desired destinations, thereafter, the dynamic map and real-time voice prompts guide them throughout the journey.

With multiple modes of communicating with the driver, an in-car GPS can help the driver to focus on the road while also receiving their information.

19. Karaoke Apps

Modes of Communication: Video, Text

Karaoke apps effortlessly integrate text, audio, and interactive features to provide a fun-filled musical experience.

They usually display song lyrics in text format timed to the melody, helping users sing along correctly.

The audio component is split into two parts: the instrumental background music and the vocal input from the user.

Some apps even include visual aids in the form of video lyrics or color-coded text to further guide singers. Users interact with the app not just by singing but also by selecting songs, adjusting settings, and sometimes even recording and sharing their performances.

20. Theater Performances

Modes of Communication: Image, Video, Audio, Interactive, Text, Physical Interaction

Theater performances, similar to cinema, couple visual and auditory components to weave narratives that captivate audiences.

This example demonstrates that multimodal communication is not as new as we might think – it existed before the digital age!

Theaters incorporate live actors, music, sound effects, props, and sometimes even projected visuals to transport audiences into their world.

Modern theaters may also employ digital elements such as LED screens or holographic technology to enhance the performance.

The immersive nature of these multilayered performances underscores how multimedia principles are not isolated within the digital sphere but are also thriving in traditional forms of communication and entertainment.

21. Virtual Tours

Virtual tours marry images, videos, audio, and oftentimes interactive elements to deliver an immersive exploration experience right in the comfort of your home.

Through a series of panoramic images or videos, viewers can visually ‘walk through’ various spaces, be it a real estate property, museum, or even world heritage site.

Audio guides and textual descriptions may provide additional context or narrate interesting stories about the places being toured.

Further, the interactive element lies in the ability to click or tap for advancing through spaces, zoom in on details, or rotate views, enabling a custom exploration experience. Virtual tours exemplify how multimedia can significantly enhance remote accessibility and exploration.

Before you Go

If you’re studying how to analyze the messages in multimodal texts, I’ve got a range of study guides that could help. Check them out below:

• How to do a Media Analysis
• How to do a Content Analysis

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 10 Reasons you’re Perpetually Single
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 20 Montessori Toddler Bedrooms (Design Inspiration)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 21 Montessori Homeschool Setups
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 101 Hidden Talents Examples

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

What’s Next? How Digital Media Shapes Our Society

By John McDonald

September 1, 2021

A summary of Professor Leah A. Lievrouw’s most recent book, which explores the rapidly changing role communication plays at the center of human experience and endeavor.

UCLA Information Studies Professor Leah A. Lievrouw’s first academic job was at Rutgers University in the late 1980s. One day, a colleague, a media effects researcher, was talking with her in her office and said, “Well, you know this new media stuff, it’s kind of interesting, but really it’s just a fad, isn’t it?”

That “new media stuff” has been the centerpiece of Lievrouw’s research ever since and today is central to many of the economic, social, political and policy challenges that confront the globe.

“My interest is in new technologies, communication information technologies and social change, and how change happens for good and ill. It’s really a sociological take. I’m more interested in what’s going on at the whole society or whole community level,” Lievrouw said. Professor Lievrouw joined the UCLA Department of Information Studies in 1995 and in 2005 co-edited “The Handbook of New Media” (Sage Publications), with Sonia Livingston of the London School of Economics. The book became a central resource for study of the field and is still used in classrooms and cited in research.

“It was really a big comprehensive survey with leading people in the field who were working on this research, right across various sub-fields and different topics,” Lievrouw said. “For a long time and in some circles still it is kind of the definitive capture of what the field was like and what the issues were at the moment.”

With changes in technology and communication rapidly occurring with ever larger impact, Lievrouw and her colleagues began talking about not just an update, but a whole new book.

Lievrouw decided to move forward and eventually linked up with Brian Loader, a professor at the University of York in the United Kingdom and editor-in-chief of the journal Information, Communication and Society, to serve as co-editor.

The book draws together the work of scholars from across the globe to examine the forces that shape our digital social lives and further our understanding of the sociocultural impact of digital media.

Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Communication

“As of this writing, as the world undergoes breakdowns in social, institutional, and technological systems across every domain of human affairs in the wake of a biological and public health crisis of unprecedented scale and scope, such a framework for understanding communicative action, technology, and social forms has never been so apt or so urgently needed.” – Routledge Publishing

Mirroring the approach of the earlier “Handbook of Social Media,” the book is organized into a three-part framework exploring the artifacts or devices, the practices and institutional arrangements that are central to digital media, and draws the connections across the three elements.

The book explores topics such as the power of algorithms, digital currency, gaming culture, surveillance, social networking, and connective mobilization. As described in the introduction by Routledge, the “Handbook delivers a comprehensive, authoritative overview of the state of new media scholarship and its most important future directions that will shape and animate current debates.”

“I really like that again this seems to be a pretty definitive state-of-the-art kind of look at what is going on with these technologies,” Lievrouw said. “This has perhaps a more critical edge than we had 20 years ago, because we have begun to see the downsides of digital media as well as all the upsides that everyone had such hopes about. What makes me really happy is that this volume kind of pulls back a bit and takes a bigger stock of the issues and challenges. We have a few chapters that I think are just really definitive, written by some of the very best people on the planet. We were very lucky to recruit such a terrific lineup of people.”

Professor Lievrouw refers to a series of essays on critical topics in the book by leading experts such as Paul Dourish exploring Ubiquity or the everywhereness of digital media; Veronica Barrasi, writing about youth, algorithms, and political data; and Julie Cohen, writing about the nature of property in a world driven by social media and more.

“In her chapter, Cohen asks, what’s the nature of property? Every aspect of our behavior or of our beliefs is constantly kind of being pulled away from us, appropriated and owned by outfits like Google and like Facebook. They now consider this their proprietary information, and we’ve not had that before in the world really, certainly not on this scale. I think that’s worth exploring,” Lievrouw said.

Timing is everything, and the new book is emerging at a time of particular relevance and questioning about digital media.

“The book has happened to come out at a moment when there’s so much skepticism, and so much worry,” Professor Lievrouw said. “What’s interesting is that the worry is in the scholarly community too and has been for a little while.

“We’re in that moment where we are having to look, not only at the most egregious and outrageous behaviors, opinions, and disinformation, and all the kinds of things that have come out from under the rocks. And the system itself is rather mature at this point, so the question becomes, ‘Where is it going to go? What do we do next? Is it just more incursion, more data, more surveillance, more circulation of stuff?’ And we are doing it without editing, without gatekeepers. And we should never forget about the impact of places like Facebook, Google, Amazon. “It has changed social structure.

It has changed cultural practices. It has changed our perception of the world fundamentally. And I think it’s not just the technology that did this, it’s the way we built it.

“I think we are entering a period of reckoning about these technologies, the whole complex of people involved in the building and operation of platforms and different kinds of applications, especially data gathering. Data has come to the center of the economics of this thing in a way that it hasn’t before. This is a good moment to reassess what works, what has been emancipatory, what has been enabling for people, how the diffusion of these technologies, and the adaptation of their use, is impacting different places and different cultures all over the world.

“Every thoughtful researcher in this area I know is turning this over in their head, saying, ‘How did we get to this point? What happened here?’ I think what this book can help us understand not only where we are right now, but also to think about what could be next, and what can we do to repair this. Right now, I don’t think anybody has a solid answer for that. If they do, it’s an answer they don’t like.”

Excerpt from Introduction

No longer new, digital media and communication technologies—and their associated infrastructures, practices, and cultural forms—have become woven into the very social fabric of contemporary human life. Despite the cautiously optimistic accounts of the potential of the Internet to foster stronger democratic governance, enable connective forms of mobilization, stimulate social capital (community, social, or crisis informatics), restructure education and learning, support remote health care, or facilitate networked flexible organization, the actual development of digital media and communication has been far more problematic. Indeed, recent commentary has been more pessimistic about the disruptive impact of digital media and communication upon our everyday lives. The promise of personal emancipation and free access to unlimited digital resources has, some argue, led us to sleepwalk into a world of unremitting surveillance, gross disparities in wealth, precarious employment opportunities, a deepening crisis in democracy, and an opaque global network of financial channels and transnational corporations with unaccountable monopoly power.

A critical appraisal of the current state of play of the digital world is thus timely, indeed overdue, and required if we are to examine these assertions and concerns clearly. There is no preordained technological pathway that digital media must follow or are following. A measure of these changes is the inadequacy of many familiar concepts— such as commons, public sphere, social capital, class, and others—to capture contemporary power relations or to explain transitions from “mass society” to networked sociality—or from mass to personalized consumption. Even the strategies of resistance to these transitions draw upon traditional appeals to unionization, democratic accountability, mass mobilization, state regulation, and the like, all part of the legacy of earlier capitalist and political forms.

How then to examine the current digitalscape? Internet-based and data-driven systems, applications, platforms, and affordances now play a pivotal role in every domain of social life. Under the rubric of new media research, computer-mediated communication, social media or Internet studies, media sociology, or media anthropology, research and scholarship in the area have moved from the fringe to the theoretical and empirical center of many disciplines, spawning a whole generation of new journals and publishers’ lists. Within communication research and scholarship itself, digital technologies and their consequences have become central topics in every area of the discipline—indeed, they have helped blur some of the most enduring boundaries dividing many of the field’s traditional specializations. Meanwhile, the ubiquity, adaptability, responsiveness, and networked structure of online communication, the advantages of which—participation, convenience, engagement, connectedness, community—were often celebrated in earlier studies, have also introduced troubling new risks, including pervasive surveillance, monopolization, vigilantism, cyberwar, worker displacement, intolerance, disinformation, and social separatism.

Technology infrastructure has several defining features that make it a distinctive object of study. Infrastructures are embedded; transparent (support tasks invisibly); have reach or scope beyond a single context; learned as part of membership in a social or cultural group; are linked to existing practices and routines; embody standards; are built on an existing, installed base; and, perhaps most critically, ordinarily become “visible” or apparent to users only when they break down: when “the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.” As of this writing, as the world undergoes breakdowns in social, institutional, and technological systems across every domain of human affairs in the wake of a biological and public health crisis of unprecedented scale and scope, such a framework for understanding communicative action, technology, and social forms has never been so apt or so urgently needed.

Two cross-cutting themes had come to characterize the quality and processes of mediated communication over the prior two decades. The first is a broad shift from the mass and toward the network as the defining structure and dominant logic of communication technologies, systems, relations, and practices; the second is the growing enclosure of those technologies, relations, and practices by private ownership and state security interests. These two features of digital media and communication have joined to create socio-technical conditions for communication today that would have been unrecognizable even to early new media scholars of the 1970s and 1980s, to say nothing of the communication researchers before them specializing in classical media effects research, political economy of media, interpersonal and group process, political communication, global/comparative communication research, or organizational communication, for example.

This collection of essays reveals an extraordinarily faceted, nuanced picture of communication and communication studies, today. For example, the opening part, “Artifacts,” richly portrays the infrastructural qualities of digital media tools and systems. Stephen C. Slota, Aubrey Slaughter, and Geoffrey C. Bowker’s piece on “occult” infrastructures of communication expands and elaborates on the infrastructure studies perspective. Paul Dourish provides an incisive discussion on the nature and meaning of ubiquity for designers and users of digital systems. Essays on big data and algorithms (Taina Bucher), mobile devices and communicative gestures (Lee Humphreys and Larissa Hjorth), digital embodiment and financial infrastructures (Kaitlyn Wauthier and Radhika Gajjala), interfaces and affordances (Matt Ratto, Curtis McCord, Dawn Walker, and Gabby Resch), hacking (Finn Brunton), and digital records and memory (David Beer) demonstrate how computation and data generation/capture have transfigured both the material features and the human experience of engagement with media technologies and systems. The second part, “Practices,” shifts focus from devices, tools, and systems to the communicative practices of the people who use them. Digital media and communication today have fostered what some writers have called datafication—capturing and rendering all aspects of communicative action, expression, and meaning into quantified data that are often traded in markets and used to make countless decisions about, and to intercede in, people’s experiences. Systems that allow people to make and share meaning are also configured by private-sector firms and state security actors to capture and enclose human communication and information.

This dynamic is played out in routine monitoring and surveillance (an essay by Mark Andrejevic), in the construction and practice of personal identity (Mary Chayko), in family routines and relationships (Nancy Jennings), in political participation (Brian Loader and Veronica Barassi), in our closest relationships and sociality (Irina Shklovski), in education and new literacies (Antero Garcia), in the increasing precarity of “information work” (Leah Lievrouw and Brittany Paris), and in what Walter Lippmann famously called the “picture of reality” portrayed in the news (Stuart Allan, Chris Peters, and Holly Steel). Many suggest that the erosion of boundaries between public and private, true and false, and ourselves and others is increasingly taken for granted, with mediated communication as likely to create a destabilizing, chronic sense of disruption and displacement as it is to promote deliberation, cohesion, or solidarities.

The broader social, organizational, and institutional arrangements that shape and regulate the tools and the practices of digital communication and information, and which themselves are continuously reformed, are explored in the third part. Nick Couldry starts with an overview of mediatization, the growing centrality of media in what he calls the “institutionalization of the social” and the establishment of social order, at every level from microscale interaction to the jockeying among nation-states. There are essays that present evidence of the instability, uncertainty, and delegitimation associated with digital media; reflections on globalization; a survey of governance and regulation; a revisitation of political economy; and the trenchant reconsideration of the notion of property. Elena Pavan and Donatella della Porta examine the role of digital media in social movements while Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman argue that digital technologies may, in fact, help reinforce people’s senses of community and belonging both online and offline. Shiv Ganesh and Cynthia Stohl show that while much past research was focused on the “fluidity” or formlessness of organization afforded by “digital ubiquity,” in fact contemporary organizing is a more subtle process comprising “opposing tendencies and human activities, of both form and formlessness.”

Taken together, the contributions present a complex, interwoven technical, social/cultural, and institutional fabric of society, which nonetheless seems to be showing signs of wear, or perhaps even breakdown in response to systemic environmental and institutional crises. As digital media and communication technologies have become routine, even banal—convenience, immediacy, connectedness—they are increasingly accompanied by a growing recognition of their negative externalities—monopoly and suppressed competition, ethical and leadership failures, and technological lock-in instead of genuine, path breaking innovation. The promise and possibility of new media and digitally mediated communication are increasingly tempered with sober assessments of risk, conflict, and exploitation.

This scenario may seem pessimistic, but perhaps one way to view the current state of digital media and communication studies is that it has matured, or reached a moment of consolidation, in which the visionary enthusiasms and forecasts of earlier decades have grown into a more developed or skeptical perspective. Digital media platforms and systems have diffused across the globe into cultural, political, and economic contexts and among diverse populations that often challenge the assumptions and expectations that were built into the early networks. The systems themselves, and their ownership and operations, have stabilized and become routinized, much as utilities and earlier media systems have done before, so they are more likely to resist root-and-branch change. They are as likely to reinforce and sustain patterns of knowledge and power as they are to “disrupt” them.

In another decade we might expect to find that the devices, practices, and institutional arrangements will have become even more integrated into common activities, places, and experiences, and culture will be unremarkable, embedded, woven into cultural practices, standardized, and invisible or transparent, just as satellite transmissions and undersea cables, or content streaming and social media platforms, are to us today. These socio-technical qualities will pose new kinds of challenges for communication researchers and scholars, but they also herald possibilities for a fuller, deeper understanding of the role communication plays at the center of human experience and endeavor.

This article is part of the UCLA Ed&IS Magazine Summer 2021 Issue. To read the full issue click here .

© 2024 Regents of the University of California

• Accessibility
• Report Misconduct
• Privacy & Terms of Use

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Social Media — Social Media Impact On Society

Social Media Impact on Society

• Categories: Social Media

About this sample

Words: 614 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 614 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof Ernest (PhD)

Verified writer

• Expert in: Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 479 words

5 pages / 2417 words

3 pages / 1526 words

2 pages / 825 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Social Media

Facebook is a social networking website that was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates in 2004. It has since grown to become one of the most popular platforms for communication and sharing content online. The [...]

Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, with millions of people around the world using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to connect, share, and engage. Whether it's posting updates about our [...]

In today's digital age, social media has become an integral part of college students' lives. With the prevalence of platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, students are constantly connected and engaged with [...]

Social media has become an integral part of modern life, shaping the way we communicate, share information, and connect with others. However, the roots of social media can be traced back to ancient civilizations and have evolved [...]

Social media creates a dopamine-driven feedback loop to condition young adults to stay online, stripping them of important social skills and further keeping them on social media, leading them to feel socially isolated. Annotated [...]

Social media is a superb factor or a awful issue? That is the maximum often asked query these days. Nicely, there are constantly aspects of the entirety. It depends to your perspective on how you perceive it. The same goes for [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Role of Media in Society Essay

Introduction, overview of the role of media in society, works cited.

In today’s society, the flow of information among the citizenry plays an important role towards the development of an informed society. To this effect, the media has been instrumental in ensuring that the population gets current news and information on different issues affecting various societies.

Arguably, without the media, the world would consist of an ignorant population devoid of any relevant information relating to issues affecting their environment. With this in mind, it could be argued that the media provides the backdrop against which we make sense of any new conditions and information that we encounter in a world that is increasingly becoming globalized.

Since its conception, the media has been hugely influential in the development of the society. The media can be used to drive public opinion, report on current news and advance some social values. The media is at best a complex genre which may be broken down into a large number of sub-genres such as news stories, opinion columns, advertisements, sports and horoscopes to name but a few.

As such, the role of the media in today’s society is important because it essentially helps individuals get access to valuable information, educate the people in the communities and is a useful, affordable and an economical tool for entertainment.

In today’s society, the social issue that has particularly struck individuals through the decades is that of the media. In this study, the various opinions held in regard to the media and how it operates shall be provided. Through the analysis of relevant literature, a brief yet informative discussion of the various benefits that have been enjoyed as a result of the media shall be presented. This shall be done by highlighting key areas where the media has been instrumental.

These areas include but are not limited to: provision of information, a source of education and knowledge, link between members of the global community and a source of entertainment. The differing opinions propagated by media critics shall also be presented. This shall at the end help us understand the roles that the media plays in society as well as the extent to which the media has been successful in performing its duties.

As such, it shall be a worthwhile endeavor to shed some light on the benefits as well as the costs that have risen due to the presence and effects of the media in our societies. This analysis shall help in the provision of a clearer understanding on how the media affects society.

The media is arguably one of the most powerful agents for change and the betterment of society. Its role as the society’s eyes; indeed a ‘watchdog’ constantly monitoring and critiquing the actions of those in authority for the betterment of society are some of the attributes that previously made the media seem as a positive influence to society.

The ability of media to so accurately reflect the mood of the society and advocate for people to fight against social injustices and vices portrays the media as a tool for promoting justice, equality and harmony among the masses.

In regards to this statement, the current states of affairs indicate that societies are ridden with selfishness and actions aimed at advancing individual goals. This can be derived from the argument raised by Michael Meyers who claims that today’s media does not educate the audience but train them (Kramer, Meyers and Rothstein 582).

This he attributes to the fact that the media outlets no longer providing credible information. In this regard, the audience does not buy the truth, but what prominent figures want them to believe. The author is trying to bring out the fact that media is biased.

The proposed biasness has its root in the anti-intellectual and anti-democratic media. In addition, the media’s advertisement of products and services is an act aimed at enabling the consumers to make informed choices. As Bernt explains, the skills and artistic nature used to present persuasive advertisements help consumers relate products to their lifestyle and preferences (193).

Texts and images represented in advertisement can signify a myriad of meanings to the viewer. All this is in an attempt by the creator of the advert to persuade the consumer to think, feel or act in a predetermined manner (Bernt 194). Advertisement is therefore more of an educative venture than a deliberate attempt to sway the consumer in any predetermined direction since in the end; the consumers are better informed of the variety of brands that are at their disposal.

Bernt suggests that the heavy emphasis of advertisements in media is due to the fact that advertisers are the dominant sources of revenue for most modern media (193). The influence that advertisements have on the people is colossal as can be inferred from the rise in sales for corporations that engage in large-scale advertisement.

Bernt further asserts that the persuasive nature of advertisements has had a great effect on American culture in regards to the relationship between working hard and purchasing power (193). Bernt asserts that advertisements have “replaced Puritanism or the Protestant work ethic as the driving force in American society that causes people to work hard in order to shop even harder (193).”

The various forms of entertainment availed e.g. Movies, sports, interactive programs and Music productions are very important means of relieving stress after a long day at work. In addition, they help alleviate boredom. As such, the sole agenda of such products is recreational and providing means for people to enjoy themselves and connect (Bellah et al 67).

For example, through satellite television providers like DSTV people all over the world are able to enjoy the entertainment genre that best suit their preferences. Examples include movies, sports, music and news. Truth be told, football clubs would never have gained such a strong and wide fan base were it not for the media.

In regards to change in journalism, Pavlik highlights on how journalism has been affected by the transformation of the new media (Fernback 163).

In his opinion, new media technologies have greatly affected the traditional perspective of journalism. This he explains by expounding on the new journalistic trends such as changes in the contents provided to the audience as news, changes in how journalists work, structural changes in news organizations and changes that have occurred in the correlations between media outlets, journalists and different audiences (Fernback 163).

These changes brought about by new media technologies have to a large extent led to the contextualization of journalism; a situation whereby journalism has become less objective and practical.

On the same note, Palvik (as cited by Fernback 163) further notes that these new trends perceive journalists as interpreters of current events who in their efforts “empower the audience and reconnect communities (Fernback 163).”

According to Palvik, the new transformations being experienced in media outlets can be attributed to the availability and emergence of online infrastructure, high degree of customization, instantaneity and interactivity that characterize new media. In his point of view, Palvik believes that such developments will at the end make journalism a better tool to promote democracy (Fernback 163).

Evidence of such developments can be derived from the emergence of the internet and the online architecture that supports this vast source of information. Through online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and the various search engines, people are able to access information and learn about different issues that affect their lives.

In addition, students in all academic fields are able to do more research in their designated fields and as a result, they become more knowledgeable in these areas than they would have been while using the traditional means of acquiring knowledge. Similarly, the internet has also provided people with a global means of communicating and learning about each other through websites like “facebook” and “twitter”.

People from different countries globally are able to interact and socialize in the comfort of their homes without the inconveniencies caused by travelling as well as the enormous costs that would have otherwise been incurred. These facts prove Palvik’s assertion that new media is at the forefront in empowering the masses (by providing useful information) and connecting communities (interactive nature of the internet, radio and TV talk shows e. t. c.).

On the other hand, Preston (as cited by Fernback 163) contends that the transformations being experienced in media are as a result of political, social, economical and communication patterns rather than technological developments.

Preston asserts that the interrelation that exists between social and informational sciences accompanied by non-academic and industrial literatures can be used by media so as to develop an equitable society and ensure social order (Fernback 163). In his book reshaping communication , Preston uses the aforementioned aspects to develop a model that explores the social role of information and communication in societies today (Fernback 163).

In his opinion, Preston argues that our cultural, informational and social bearings are hinged not on technological advancements, but on the socioeconomic, political and communication trends that we adapt (Fernback 164). In this regard, it can arguably be stated that the role of the media in society is not determined by technological advancements, but by the socio-technical paradigm (Fernback 164).

The positive view of the media has greatly been challenged with time. No longer do the various media outlets stand out as the ‘last front were nobility and idealism still had a foothold.’ Instead, the media just like any other business has been influenced by competition and ratings. As such, it has been noted for a fact that media outlets do at times express their own biased opinions which may not always be ideal or noble at that.

For example, Gay Talese attests to the fact that the New York Times editor Gerald Boyd refused to print a story about an interracial wedding simply because it never emphasized on Black victimization (Kramer, Meyers and Rothstein 575). According to Gay Talese, any story that would soften the perception people had on such issues was disallowed and could not be printed (Kramer, Meyers and Rothstein 575).

In this case, the Media’s actions which were previously perceived as being selfless and socially motivated have been exposed to not always have been driven by benevolence. These actions are at times resounded with self interests and personal gains for the media houses and the corporations that sponsor them.

The previous view of the media’s ability to correctly reflect on the society’s mood has also been greatly questioned as the media does at time appear to affect the set the society’s mood as opposed to reflecting it through the use of propaganda. (Kramer, Meyers and Rothstein suggest that the one of the media’s greatest power is in its ability to subtly influence our opinion (575).

They further assert that in events that elicit a lot of public opinion, propaganda plays a great role and polarizes people along lines that they may not necessarily have taken had they not been “persuaded” to do so.

This subtle psychological nudges can be used to further the cause of big corporations in the form of advertisements or by politicians who want to sway public opinions for their own good. To this effect, the people’s previous trust in the media report has therefore been greatly clouded by this realization.

In terms of the unbiased reporting which had for a long time been viewed to be the hallmark of the popular media, it has been noted that some media reports are actually aimed at making the recipient of the information form a certain pre-determined opinion thus destroying any illusion of un-biasness (Kramer, Meyers and Rothstein 575).

Media outlets can therefore set out to further some social cause which they believe in. Using the cultivation theory, Burton propose that exposure to some kinds of media often cultivate certain attitudes and values (Steffen 455). As an example, Steffen sheds some light on how Arab media has in the recent past adopted the western form of journalism and media presentation (455).

In this regard, the author states that even journalists from countries such as Egypt and other Arabic countries which has stringent media policies accept western media values such as accuracy and balance (Steffen 455). As such, the reporter’s opinions and attitude will rub on the general population thus coloring their view of some events.

In addition, the aforementioned assertion that advertisement aired in different media outlets is aimed at making the consumer better informed has been changed by evidence which strongly suggests that advertisements are aimed at actively influencing the decision that the consumer makes or may make in future (Steffen 456).

What this means is that advertisement is no longer a primary tool for marketing, instead, it has been used to combat the aggressive competition. To this effect, only the consumers suffer because the advertisements no longer help them make informed decisions about the products but instead, the advertisements influence their judgments by giving half-truths.

An especially troubling fact that revealed through various research efforts is that uncontrolled media in some instances leads to desensitization of the population on issues such as violence.

Continuous exposure to media violence especially on the young and impressionable segment of the population can lead to catastrophic results as has been witnessed before in the various random shootouts that occur in our schools. Research shows that media violence encourages aggressive behavior and leads to pessimism in children (Burton 123; Steffen 456).

This information contradicts the aforementioned perception of the media as a guardian and propagator of social values since the compelling evidence presented by research showed that media also leads to breaking of social values and leads to a disruption of harmony through the violence it encourages.

On the same note, rampant advertisements through media outlets have in the recent past characterized modern media. These advertisements aim at influencing the consumer to maintain or develop some form of ideology (Bernt 194). This close relationship that media and advertising have developed raises concerns over the influences that the media may be willing to wield so as to achieve the advertising objectives.

A closer observation of the movies and other entertainment forms presented by the media revealed heavy advertisements therein. These rampant acts of branding were previously unknown to many and their effect though unconsciously administered is substantial.

The media’s promotion of social values is also at times only used as a cover to influence consumers by use of advertisement (Fernback 164). Due to these advertisements, naive recipients of the information presented are unwittingly influenced into buying the products that the particular advertisements promote.

This is at best a very irresponsible behavior by the media since most people are favorably disposed to agree with sentiments that are projected by the media. These misuses of social issues as a marketing tool have also changed the positive role that the media was supposed to deliver. This is mainly due to the fact that the media is being used as a tool for furthering the objectives of corporations at the cost of an unsuspecting population.

The role played by the media in today’s society cannot be understated. However, caution should be taken because as expressed in this study, not all media is healthy. Through this research, the knowledge that has been transferred herein should not make the public skeptical of the media but should help them become more skeptical about the issues being addressed through various media outlets.

This will invariably transform them from being passive, unquestioning and all-believing recipients, to active and questioning recipients of the information which is provided by the media. Nevertheless, a free and vibrant media is necessary for the good of the society. An unfettered media is the hallmark of a truly unbiased society. However, one should adopt a more questioning stance when dealing with any information provided by the media.

Bellah, Robert. ET AL.”Community, Commitment, and Individuality.” Literacies: Reading, Writing, Interpretation. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. 65-74. Print.

Bernt, Joseph. P. “Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 78.1 (2001): 193-194. Research Library, ProQuest. Web.

Fernback, Jan. “Journalism and New Media / Reshaping Communications: Technology, Information and Social Change.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 57.2 (2002): 162-164. Research Library, ProQuest. Web.

Kramer Hilton, Michael Meyers and Edward Rothstein. “The media and our country’s agenda.” Partisan Review 69.4 (2002): 574-606. Research Library, ProQuest. Web.

Steffen, Brian. J. “Media and Society: Critical Perspectives.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 83.2 (2006): 455-456. Research Library, ProQuest. Web.

• Media and Celebrity Influence on Society
• The Impact of Media on Society
• The Web Site for Online Journalism
• Social Media Replacing Traditional Journalism
• Media and Communication in Journalism Firms
• New Advertising Campaign of Crocs Company
• The Corporation & Our Media, Not Theirs
• Guns, Germs and Steel
• Functions and Power of Mass Media: Views of Two German Authors
• Chicken Run and The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, July 11). Role of Media in Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-media/

"Role of Media in Society." IvyPanda , 11 July 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-media/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Role of Media in Society'. 11 July.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Role of Media in Society." July 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-media/.

1. IvyPanda . "Role of Media in Society." July 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-media/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Role of Media in Society." July 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-media/.

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

• Basic site functions
• Ensuring secure, safe transactions
• Secure account login
• Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
• Remembering privacy and security settings
• Analyzing site traffic and usage
• Personalized search, content, and recommendations
• Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

• Remembering general and regional preferences
• Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

Introductory essay

Written by the educators who created Covering World News, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in their field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

At the newsstand, on our smartphones and while watching the evening news, we learn about faraway people and places from the journalists, stringers and correspondents who work for news agencies and other media outlets around the globe. Global news is everywhere — from the front page news read by a New Yorker on Madison Avenue to the government radio station broadcasting in Pyongyang.

However, it would be a mistake to consider this a completely new phenomenon or to overstate its pervasiveness. Many people tend to think that global news is both a recent phenomenon and one that we can credit to advances in technology. If we think of 'news' in terms of newspaper articles or television reporting, then news is only as old as the technologies of press and video, and dates back to the first newsletters that circulated in Europe in the 17th century.

But in reality, humans have shared information about current affairs within and across borders for thousands of years, starting with the news networks of the ancient Phoenicians. The historical record also describes merchants sharing political news along ancient trade routes, minstrels and other traveling artists whose fictional performances also carried information about social change, and criers in medieval town squares.

If news is not a product of modern technologies, it's nevertheless true that technological change has had a dramatic impact on how news is made and consumed: where once we had printed newsletters distributed twice a day, now we have Twitter feeds refreshed twice a minute, and carrying information from an ever-widening array of sources. We live, as media critics like Marshall McLuhan have argued, in a global village.

The trouble with this vision of 'global news' is that it's not nearly as complete as we imagine it to be. According to the World Bank, of the world's seven billion people, only 80% have access to electricity (or the gadgets like computer and televisions that depend on it), 75% have access to mobile phones, and a meager 35% to the Internet. Most people on the planet aren't connected to what we think of as the 'global media' at all. As Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman points out in his TED Talk, "There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected, [but] the world isn't even close to flat. It's extremely lumpy."

Just as critically, the content that makes up the 'global media' is still heavily focused on a few key centers of power. In her TED Talk, Public Radio International's Alisa Miller shares a powerful map of the news consumed by American audiences in 2008: most of it focused on the U.S., and to a lesser extent, on countries with which the U.S. has military ties. Ethan Zuckerman points out that this lack of global coverage is pervasive, whether it's at elite news outlets like The New York Times or on crowdsourced digital information platforms like Wikipedia.

Moreover, Zuckerman argues, it's not just about the stories that get made — it's about what stories we choose to listen to. Thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson made waves when he argued that political structures (like states) depend upon a set of shared values, the 'imagined community,' and that the media plays a key role in creating those values. Zuckerman, however, argues that in today's world the disconnect between what we imagine to be our community, and the community we actually live in, is a major source of global media inequality. We connect to the Internet, with its technological capacity to link up the whole world, and imagine that we live in a global village. But in practice, we spend most of our time reading news shared by our Facebook friends, whose lives and interests are close to our own. Zuckerman calls this 'imagined cosmopolitanism.'

Compounding the problem, the stories we do attend to can be heavily distorted, reducing whole countries or societies to a single stereotype or image. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains in her TED Talk about the 'single story,' when all the tales we hear about a country follow the same pattern, we begin to imagine that this pattern is all there is know. The 'single story' can affect all of us, rich and poor: Adichie talks of her own misconceptions about Nigeria's rural poor, of her surprise at encountering the diversity of life in Mexico, and of her college roommate's reductive vision of Africa as poor and underdeveloped. The difference, she argues, is that there are simply more stories out there about powerful countries than about less powerful ones, and that makes it harder for us to reduce those societies to 'single stories' in our minds.

What can we do?

First, we can tell different stories about the places that are prone to reduction. In her TED Talk, Yemeni newspaper editor Nadia Al-Sakkaf takes us to the Yemen she lives in — where terrorism and political upheaval are real problems, but far from the whole picture. Moreover, in her account, each image can tell many stories. A woman with a veiled face can represent the role of fundamentalist Islam in Yemeni society, but she argues that a look behind the veil shows us that many of these women are holding down jobs and earning income, and in so doing, changing their role within their own families and in Yemeni society more broadly.

Second, we can find ways to invest in journalism. As Alisa Miller argues, a major obstacle to a truly global news media is the cost of production, of keeping bureaus in every country and paying for journalists to produce deep, investigative stories. The great paradox of media economics in the digital age is that the Internet makes it possible for us to consume more content, but falling advertising revenues means that each piece of content must cost a little less to produce. That pushes news outlets, even wealthy ones, in the direction of gossip and regurgitated press releases that can be produced by a reporter who hasn't left her desk.

One way to break this cycle, Ethan Zuckerman argues, is to make small and targeted investments in local journalists in the developing world. He describes a blogger training program in Madagascar that became a newsroom overnight when world media outlets needed verified content from a country undergoing revolution. He highlights the critical work of professional curators like Amira Al Hussaini at Global Voices or Andy Carvin at the Associated Press.

At the heart of these recommendations is a shift in the way we understand the mission of journalists — or rather, a return to an old way of thinking about news.

Right up until the early 20th century, all journalists were assumed to be opinion writers. Reporters went places to report, made up their own minds about a topic, and wrote an account that included not only facts, but an argument for what position readers at home should take and what political actions might follow. George Orwell's colorful and opinionated essays from South East Asia, for example, were published as reportage.

Then the Cold War started, and in the democratic West, journalists began to strive for objective impartiality, to distinguish their work from the obvious, state-sponsored propaganda of the Soviet bloc. Many critics at the time questioned whether 'true' objectivity was possible, but no major western news organization disputed that it was the ideal.

Today, we're seeing a return to the older understanding of journalism, towards an acceptance that even independent reporting carries a viewpoint, shaped by the people who produce it. Moreover, contemporary journalists are increasingly coming to see this viewpoint as a strength rather than as a weakness, and using social media to be more transparent to readers about the values they bring to stories. New York University's Jay Rosen, for example, has argued powerfully that the 'view from nowhere' advocated by 20th century western reporters is dangerous because it can lead journalists to treat 'both sides' of a story equally even when one side is telling objective falsehoods or committing crimes.

Many of the speakers in Covering World News describe their journalism — whether it is Global Voices or the Yemen Times — as having an explicit moral and political mission to change our perceptions of under-covered regions of the world.

But no speaker is more passionate on this subject than TED speaker and photojournalist James Nachtwey, who credits the activist context of the 1960s for inspiring him to enter journalism, using photography to "channel anger" into a force for social change. Nachtwey's work has brought him, at times, into partnership with non-profit aid organizations, an alliance that is increasingly common in today's media world but would surely not have fit within the 'objective' media of a half-century ago. Nachtwey sees himself as a 'witness' whose place in the story is not to be invisible, but to channel his own humane outrage at war or social deprivation in order to drive social and political change: in one case, a story he produced prompted the creation of a non-profit organization to collect donations from readers.

This kind of work is a form of 'bridge building,' a theme that emerges in many of our talks. For while there may not be one 'global media' that includes all communities equally and reaches all parts of the globe, there are many individuals whose skills and backgrounds enable them to go between the connected and less connected pockets of the world, bridging gaps and contributing to mutual understanding. That, perhaps, is the way forward for international journalism.

Let's begin our study with Public Radio International CEO Alisa Miller, an ardent advocate for a global perspective in news programming. In her TEDTalk "The news about the news," Miller shares some eye-opening statistics about the quantity and quality of recent foreign reporting by American mainstream media organizations.

Alisa Miller

How the news distorts our worldview, relevant talks.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The danger of a single story.

Ethan Zuckerman

Listening to global voices.

James Nachtwey

My wish: let my photographs bear witness.

Nadia Al-Sakkaf

See yemen through my eyes.

Suggestions or feedback?

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Machine learning
• Sustainability
• Black holes
• Classes and programs

Departments

• Aeronautics and Astronautics
• Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Architecture
• Political Science
• Mechanical Engineering

Centers, Labs, & Programs

• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
• Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
• Lincoln Laboratory
• School of Architecture + Planning
• School of Engineering
• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
• Sloan School of Management
• School of Science
• MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

Why social media has changed the world — and how to fix it

Press contact :, media download.

*Terms of Use:

Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license . You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT."

Previous image Next image

Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?

If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.

“Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing,” says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. “When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”

The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

“Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.

As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, "starts where ‘The Social Dilemma’ leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?”

“This machine exists in every facet of our lives,” Aral says. “And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.”

When “engagement” equals anger

“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.

“This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes,” Aral says. “The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we’re seeing — it’s an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content.”

From Russia to marketing

“The Hype Machine” explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread  false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Insta­gram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.

“I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.

We do not know if Russia’s efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.

As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the “lift” generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.

“The two questions I get asked the most these days,” Aral says, “are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same.”

Ideas for improvement

“The Hype Machine” has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy.” Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

In that vein, “The Hype Machine” has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.

Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.

“I do not advocate any one silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.

But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.

“If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely,” Aral observes. “I mean, that’s why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.”

Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.

“I don’t think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint,” Aral says. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book.”

Share this news article on:

Press mentions.

Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired . Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.” 

New York Times

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

Previous item Next item

Related Links

• MIT Sloan School of Management

Related Topics

• Business and management
• Social media
• Books and authors
• Behavioral economics

Related Articles

The catch to putting warning labels on fake news

Our itch to share helps spread Covid-19 misinformation

Better fact-checking for fake news

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories

Social networking

More mit news.

Scientists discover molecules that store much of the carbon in space

Read full story →

Study: Hospice care provides major Medicare savings

Study: Fusion energy could play a major role in the global response to climate change

SMART researchers develop a method to enhance effectiveness of cartilage repair therapy

Aspiring to sustainable development

Physicists discover first “black hole triple”

• More news on MIT News homepage →

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA

• Map (opens in new window)
• Events (opens in new window)
• People (opens in new window)
• Careers (opens in new window)
• Accessibility
• Social Media Hub
• MIT on Facebook
• MIT on YouTube
• MIT on Instagram

The Significance and Impact of the Media in Contemporary Society

• First Online: 10 March 2018

Cite this chapter

• Faith Gordon 3  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies ((PSLS))

1341 Accesses

This chapter explores the significance of the media and the impact it has on the meaning-making processes in contemporary society. It draws on key national and international academic literature and previous studies on the role and functions of the media. This includes the key theoretical debates on deviancy amplification, folk devils and moral panics. It assesses the media’s impact on criminal justice policies and on public opinion of, and support for authoritarian ideologies and policies. In particular, it will focus on exploring how the media can influence popular culture and the impact of media portrayals of crime on societal perceptions, responses and reactions directed towards social groups, in particular children and young people ‘in conflict with the law’.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

It has long been acknowledged that the media are difficult to capture and define (Craig 2004 : 3). As outlined in Chap. 1 , the terms ‘media’ or ‘mass media’ refer to the traditional definition of the media, as consisting of newspapers (the print media), radio (broadcast media) and news bulletins and programs (televised media). While choosing to focus on the contemporary media, this book acknowledges from the outset that there is an extensive body of work existing on the historical origins of the media; mass communication and its impact, and the role of technological development (see Downing 1980 ; Frost 2000 ; Curran 2002 ).

There has been much criticism of pluralist theories on the media, including the arguments that pluralism is an ideological justification for the media and that the basis of the theory is not grounded in evidence. Rather the pluralist model assumes that the content of the media is diverse, without presenting evidence to reinforce or prove this theory (see Blumler and Gurevitch 1995 ).

Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of a range of media outlets in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) is a prime example of the concentration of power and the influence of owners on media content (see Golding and Murdock 1991 ; Horrie 2003 ; Cole 2005 ). Further to this, academics such as Barker ( 1999 : 46) argue that conglomeration has aided a general concentration of media ownership, with research such as Bagdikian’s ( 2004 ) stating that the US media were controlled by 50 corporations in the 1980s, and by 2003 this had been reduced to five controlling the majority of the 178,000 media outlets. Significantly as Tait ( 2012 : 518) observes, the ‘scale and intensity’ of the phone hacking scandal in 2011, saw the resignation of the chief executive of one of the UK’s most influential newspaper groups, the resignation of one of the UK’s most senior police officers, the arrest of Andy Coulson, who had acted as the then Prime Minister, David Cameron’s head of communications, the resignation of two senior executives from key companies in the Murdoch empire, as well as the collapse of the takeover deal in relation to BSkyB and the closure of the News of the World (see also Keeble and Mair 2012 ; McKnight 2012 ; Watson and Hickman 2012 ).

As Barrat ( 1994 : 61) notes, the majority of media organisations are influenced by ‘a variety of commercial influences’, including the need to be profitable and also obtaining revenue through ‘advertising’. Some media outlets are part of the public sector, such as the BBC and they have the requirement ‘to provide a public service’, by ‘informing, educating, and entertaining audiences’ (Barrat 1994 : 61).

Tait’s ( 2012 : 520) analysis of the phone hacking scandal asserts that it has ‘revealed some fundamental issues in British political communications, the political system and the practice and regulation of journalism’. His analysis also documents ‘a secret history’ between Murdoch and British politics (Tait 2012 : 520–523).

Semiology provides a suitable vehicle for studying the meanings behind media content (see O’Connor 1989 ; Hall 1997 ; Berger 1998 ; Barker 2000 ; Schirato and Yell 2000 ). In contemporary literature it is now referred to as semiotics and was first developed by the Swiss linguist, Saussure, who proposed that meaning was ‘produced through … language systems’ (Schirato and Yell 2000 : 19). He focused on the ‘linguistic sign’, which he divided into the ‘signifier’, ‘the signified’ and the ‘sign’ (Schirato and Yell 2000 : 19).

As the findings of a number of content analysis studies highlight, the media exaggerate the levels of crime, in particular violent crime in the UK (see Ditton and Duffy 1983 ; Schlesinger and Murdock 1991 ; Williams and Dickinson 1993 ; Callanan 2005 ; Greer 2005 ; Reiner 2007 ).

Dorfman and Schiraldi’s ( 2001 ) research found that 76 percent of the public said they formed their opinions about crime from the media, whereas 22 percent reported that their knowledge of crime was formed through their personal experiences.

Bibliography

Aggleton, P. (1987) Deviance , London: Tavistock Publications.

Google Scholar  

Albertazzi, D. and Cobley, P. (2010) The Media: An Introduction (Third Edition), Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Allan, S. (1999) News Culture , Buckingham: Open University Press.

Ang, I. (1990a) ‘Culture and Communication’, European Journal of Communication , Volume 5, Number 2, pages 239–260.

Ang, I. (1990b) Desperately Seeking the Audience , London: Routledge.

Archers, J. and Jones, J. (2003) ‘Headlines from History: Violence in the Press, 1850–1914’, in E. A. Stanko (ed.) The Meanings of Violence , London: Routledge, pages 17–32.

Bagdikian, B. H. (2004) The New Media Monopoly , Boston, USA: Beacon Press.

Barker, C. (1999) Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities , Buckingham: Open University Press.

Barker, C. (2000) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Barrat, D. (1994) Media Sociology (Fourth Edition), London: Routledge.

Barthes, R. (1977) ‘“The Photograph Message”, Translated by Stephen Heath, 1977, An Excerpt’, in V. Goldberg (ed.) Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to Present , Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, pages 15–31.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity , Translation by Mark Ritter, London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Becker, H. (1963) Outsider: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York and London: Free Press.

Becker, H. (1967) ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems , Volume 14, Number 3, pages 234–247.

Berger, A. A. (1998) Media Analysis Techniques (Second Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Berrington, E. and Honkatukia, P. (2002) ‘An Evil Monster and a Poor Thing: Female Violence in the Media’, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention , Volume 3, pages 50–72.

Article   Google Scholar  

Bessant, J. and Hil, R. eds. (1997) Youth Crime and the Media: Media Representations of and Reactions to Young People in Relation to Law and Order , Hobart, Australia: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies.

Bignell, J. (1997) Media Semiotics: An Introduction , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Blumler, J. and Gurevitch, M. (1995) The Crisis of Public Communication , London: Routledge.

Book   Google Scholar  

Box, S. (1983) Power, Crime, and Mystification , New York, USA: Tavistock.

Braham, P. (1982) ‘How the Media Report Race’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media , London: Methuen, pages 274–275.

Branston, G. and Stafford, R. (2003) The Media Student’s Book (Third Edition), London: Routledge.

Briggs, A. and Cobley, P. eds. (1998) The Media: An Introduction , Essex: Addison Wesley Longman.

Briggs, A. and Cobley, P. eds. (2002) The Media: An Introduction (Second Edition), Essex: Addison Wesley Longman.

Brown, S. (1998) Understanding Youth and Crime: Listening to Youth? , Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bryant, J. and Zillmann, D. (2002) Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research , London: Routledge.

Caliendo, S. M. (2011) ‘Race, Media and Popular Culture’, in S. M. Caliendo and C. D. Mcllwain (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity , Oxon: Routledge, pages 73–81.

Callanan, V. J. (2005) Feeding the Fear of Crime: Crime-related Media and Support for Three Strikes , New York, USA: LFB Scholarly.

Camargo Heck, M. (1980) ‘The Ideological Dimension of Media Messages’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds.) Culture, Media, Language , Oxon: Routledge, pages 122–127.

Chibnall, S. (1975) ‘The Crime Reporter: A Study in the Production of Commercial Knowledge’, Sociology , Volume 9, Number 1, pages 49–66.

Chibnall, S. (1977) Law and Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press , London: Tavistock Publications.

Cicourel, A. (1968) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice , New York: The Free Press.

Cohen, A. (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang , London: Collier-Macmillan.

Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (First Edition), Oxford: Martin Robertson.

Cohen, S. (1980) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Second Edition), Oxford: Martin Robertson.

Cohen, S. and Young, J. eds. (1981) The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media (Second Revised Edition), London: Constable.

Cole, P. (2005) ‘The Structure of the Print Industry’, in R. Keeble (ed.) Print Journalism: A Critical Introduction , Oxon: Routledge, pages 21–38.

Conboy, M. (2006) Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language , London: Routledge.

Cormack, M. (2000) ‘The Reassessment of Ideology’, in D. Fleming (ed.) 21st Century Media Studies Textbook , Manchester: Manchester University Press, pages 93–95.

Corner, J. and Hawthorn, J. eds. (1993) Communication Studies: An Introductory Reader (Fourth Edition), London: Arnold Publishers.

Cornwell, B. and Linders, A. (2002) ‘The Myth of “Moral Panic”: An Alternative Account of LSD Prohibition’, Deviant Behavior , Volume 23, Number 4, July–August, pages 307–330.

Craig, G. (2004) The Media, Politics and Public Life, New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Unwin.

Croteau, D. and Hoynes, W. (2003) Media Society: Industries, Imagery, and Audiences , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Curran, J. (1998) ‘Newspapers: Beyond Policy Economy’, in A. Briggs and P. Cobley (eds.) The Media: An Introduction , Essex: Longman, pages 81–96.

Curran, J. (2002) Media and Power, London: Routledge.

Curran, J. and Seaton, J. (1992) Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (Fourth Edition), London: Routledge.

Curran, J., Douglas, A. and Whannel, G. (1980) ‘The Political Economy of the Human-Interest Story’, in A. Smith (ed.) Newspapers and Democracy , Cambridge: MIT Press, pages 288–347.

Curran, J., Gurevitch, M. and Woollacott, J. (1988) ‘The Study of the Media: Theoretical Approaches’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media , London: Routledge, pages 11–29.

Devereux, E. (2003) Understanding the Media , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Devereux, E. (2007) Understanding the Media (Second Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Ditton, J. and Duffy, J. (1983) ‘Bias in the Newspaper Reporting of Crime News’, British Journal of Criminology , Volume 23, Number 2, pages 159–165.

Dorfman, L. and Schiraldi, V. (2001) Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News , New Hampshire, USA: The Police Policy Studies Council.

Downes, D. and Rock, P. (2007) Understanding Deviance , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Downing, J. (1980) The Media Machine , London: Pluto Press Limited.

Durham, A. M., Elrod, H. P. and Kinkade, P. T. (1995) ‘Images of Crime and Justice: Murder and the “True Crime” Genre’, Journal of Criminal Justice , Volume 23, Number 2, pages 143–152.

Dyer, R. (1993) The Matters of Images: Essays on Representations, London: Routledge.

Eldridge, J., Kitzinger, J. and Williams, K. (1997) The Mass Media Power in Modern Britain , London: Oxford University Press.

Entman, R. M. (1993) ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication , Volume 43, Number 4, pages 51–58.

Ericson, R. V., Baranek, P.M. and Chan, J. B. L. (1987) Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization , Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Ericson, R. V., Baranek, P. M. and Chan, J. B. L. (1999) ‘Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources’, in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 297–307.

Erikson, K. T. (1962) ‘Notes on the Sociology of Deviance’, Social Problems , Volume 9, Number 4, pages 307–314.

Erikson, K. T. (1966) Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance , New York, USA: John Wiley and Sons.

Farnen, R. F. (1990) ‘Decoding the Mass Media and Terrorism Connection: Militant Extremism As Systematic and Symbiotic Processes’, in C. R. Sander (ed.) Marginal Conventions, Popular Culture, Mass Media and Social Deviance, Ohio, USA: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pages 98–116.

Farr, K. A. (2001) ‘Women on Death Row: Media Representations of Female Evil’, in D. E. Eber and A. G. Neal (eds.) Memory and Representation: Constructed Truths and Competing Realities , Ohio, USA: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pages 73–87.

Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. (1989) Reading Television , London: Routledge.

Fowler, R. (1994) Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press , London: Routledge.

France, A. (2007) Understanding Youth in Late Modernity , Berkshire: Open University Press.

Franzese, R. J. (2009) The Sociology of Deviance: Differences, Tradition, and Stigma , Illinois, USA: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.

Frost, C. (2000) Media Ethics and Self-Regulation , Essex: Longman.

Gado, M. (2008) Death Row Women: Murder, Justice, and the New York Press , California, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Gallagher, M. (1982) ‘Negotiation of Control in Media Organizations’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media , London: Routledge, pages 148–171.

Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. H. (1965) ‘The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers’, Journal of Peace Research , Volume 2, Number 1, pages 64–91.

Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. H. (1982) ‘Structuring and Selecting News’, in S. Cohen and J. Young (eds.) The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media (First Edition), London: Constable, pages 52–64.

Gieber, W. (1999) ‘News Is What Newspapermen Make It’, in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 218–223.

Glover, D. (1984) The Sociology of the Mass Media, Cornwall: Causeway Press Limited.

Golding, P. and Elliott, P. (1999) ‘Making the News’ (Excerpt), in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 102–111.

Golding, P. and Murdock, G. (1991) ‘Culture, Communications, and Political Economy’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society , London: Edward Arnold, pages 15–32.

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance , Oxford: Blackwell.

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (2009) Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Second Edition), West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Goodwin, A. (1990) ‘TV News: Striking the Right Balance?’, in A. Goodwin and G. Whannel (eds.) Understanding Television , London: Routledge, pages 42–59.

Gorton, K. (2009) Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Green, D. A. (2008a) ‘Suitable Vehicles: Framing Blame and Justice When Children Kill a Child’, Crime Media Culture , Volume 4, Number 2, August, pages 197–220.

Green, D. A. (2008b) When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Greenslade, R. (2003) Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda , London: Macmillan.

Greer, C. (2005) ‘Crime and Media’, in C. Hale, K. Hayward, A. Wahidin and E. Wincup (eds.) Criminology , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 152–182.

Gross, L. (1992) ‘Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media’, in E. Seiter, H. Borchers, G. Kreutzner and E. M. Warth (eds.) Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power , London: Routledge, pages 130–149.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan.

Hall, S. (1986) ‘Media Power and Class Power’, in J. Curran, J. Ecclestone, G. Oakley and A. Richardson (eds.) Bending Reality: The State of the Media , London: Pluto Press Limited, pages 5–14.

Hall, S. (1997) ‘Discourse, Power and the Subject’, in S. Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 41–74.

Hall, S. and Scraton, P. (1981) ‘Law, Class and Control’, in M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan and J. Pawson (eds.) Crime and Society , London: RKP, pages 460–498.

Hart, A. (1991) Understanding the Media: A Practical Guide , London: Routledge.

Haydon, D. and Scraton, P. (2000) ‘‘Condemn a Little More, Understand a Little Less’: The Political Context and Rights Implications of the Domestic and European Rulings in the Venables - Thompson Case’, Journal of Law and Society , Volume 27, Number 3, pages 416–448.

Herman, E. (1990) ‘Media in the U.S. Political Economy’, in J. Downing, A. Sreberny-Mohammadi and A. Mohammadi (eds.) Questioning the Media , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 75–87.

Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (1988) The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, USA: Pantheon.

Horrie, C. (2003) Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death of the Tabloid , London: Carlton Publishing Group.

Jewkes, Y. (2004) Media and Crime , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Keeble, R. L. and Mair, J. eds. (2012) The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial , Suffolk: Arima Publishing.

Khabaz, D. V. (2006) Manufactured Schema: Thatcher, the Miners and the Culture Industry , Leicester: Matador.

Kidd-Hewitt, D. (1995) ‘Crime and the Media: A Criminological Perspective’, pages 9–24, in D. Kidd-Hewitt and R. Osborne (eds.) Crime and the Media: The Post-Modern Spectacle , London: Pluto Press.

Kitsuse, J. I. (1962) ‘Social Reaction to Deviant Behavior: Problems of Theory and Method’, Social Problems , Volume 9, Number 1, pages 247–256.

Knight, V. (2016) Remote Control Television in Prison , Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Krinsky, C. ed. (2008) Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth , Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Lacey, N. (1998) Image and Representation: Key Concepts in Media Studies , Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press Limited.

Lashmar, P. (2010) ‘The Journalist, Folk Devil’, Paper Presented at the Moral Panics in the Contemporary World , International conference, Brunel University London, 10–12 December.

Lemert, E. M. (1951) Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior , New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lemert, E. M. (1967) Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control , Englewood Cliffs, USA: Prentice Hall.

Lilly, J., Cullen, F. T. and Ball, R. A. (2011) Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences , (Fifth Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Machin, D. and Niblock, S. (2006) News Production: Theory and Practice , London: Routledge.

Marsh, I. and Melville, G. (2009) Crime, Justice and the Media , Oxon: Routledge.

Masterman, L. (1990) Teaching the Media , London: Routledge.

Mawby, R. C. (2010) ‘Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police and “Law-and-Order News”’, British Journal of Criminology , Volume 50, Number 6, pages 1060–1076.

McKnight, D. (2012) Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power , UK: Allen and Unwin.

McNair, B. (1994) News and Journalism in the UK , London: Routledge.

McNair, B. (2009) News and Journalism in the UK (Fifth Edition), London: Routledge.

McQuail, D. (1972) Sociology of Mass Communications , Harmondsworth: Penguin Publishers.

McQuail, D. (1991) ‘Mass Media in the Public Interest: Towards a Framework of Norms for Media Performance’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society , London: Edward Arnold, pages 68–81.

McQuail, D. (2000) McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (Fourth Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

McRobbie, A. (1994) Postmodernism and Popular Culture , London: Routledge.

McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. (1995) ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-mediated Social Worlds’, British Journal of Sociology , Volume 46, pages 559–574.

McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. (2002) ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-mediated Social Worlds’, in J. Muncie, G. Hughes and E. McLaughlin (eds.) Youth Justice: Critical Readings , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 68–79.

Mercer, C. (1992) ‘Regular Imaginings: The Newspaper and the Nation’, in T. Bennett, P. Buckridge, D. Carter and C. Mercer (eds.) Celebrating the Nation: A Critical Study of Australia’s Bicentenary , Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, pages 26–46.

Merton, R. K. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure , New York, USA: The Free Press.

Moores, S. (1993) Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption , London: SAGE.

Morley, D. (1997) Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.

Muncie, J. (2006) ‘Labelling’, in E. McLaughlin and J. Muncie (eds.) The SAGE Dictionary of Criminology (Second Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 229–231.

Muraskin, R. and Domash, S. F. (2007). Crime and the Media: Headlines vs. Reality , New Jersey, USA: Pearson Education.

Murdock, P. and Golding, P. (1977) ‘Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations’, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woolacott (eds.) Mass Communication and Society , London: Edward Arnold, pages 12–43.

Naylor, B. (2001). ‘Reporting Violence in the British Print Media: Gendered Stories’, The Howard Journal , Volume 40, Number 2, pages 180–194.

Newburn, T. (2007) Criminology , Devon: Willan Publishing.

Nichols, B. (2010) Introduction to Documentary (Second Edition), Indiana, USA: Indiana University Press.

North, L. (2009) The Gendered Newsroom: How Journalists Experience the Changing World of Media , Cresskill, USA: Hampton Press, Inc.

O’Connor, A. (1989) ‘The Problem of American Cultural Studies’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication , December, pages 405–413.

O’Sullivan, T., Dutton, B. and Rayner, P. (2003) Studying the Media (Third Edition), London: Arnold Publishers.

Osgerby, B. (2004) Youth Media , Oxon: Routledge.

Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears , Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Perry, D. K. (2002) Theory and Research in Mass Communication Contexts and Consequences (Second Edition), New Jersey, USA: Laurence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publisher.

Potter, W. J. (2010) Media Literacy , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Poynting, S., Noble, G., Tabar, P. and Collins, J. (2004) Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other , Sydney Institute of Criminology Series, Number 18, Sydney: The Sydney Institute of Criminology.

Prus, R. and Grills, S. (2003) The Deviant Mystique: Involvements, Realities and Regulation , Westport, USA: Praeger Publishers.

Radway, J. (1984) Reading the Romance , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Regoli, R., Hewitt, J. and DeLisi, M. (2011) Delinquency in Society: The Essentials , London: Jones and Bartlett.

Reiner, R. (2007) ‘Media-made Criminality: The Representation of Crime in the Mass Media’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Fourth Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 302–340.

Robson, G. (2004) “No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care”: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom , Oxford: Berg.

Schirato, T. and Yell, S. (2000) Communication and Culture: An Introduction , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Schissel, B. (1997) Blaming Children: Youth Crime, Moral Panics and the Politics of Hate , Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Schissel, B. (2006) Still Blaming Children: Youth Conduct and the Politics of Child Hating , Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Schissel, B. (2008) ‘Justice Undone: Public Panic and the Condemnation of Children and Youth’, in C. Krinsky (ed.) Moral Panics Over Contemporary Children and Youth , Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pages 15–30.

Schlesinger, P. (1987) Putting ‘Reality’ Together: BBC News , London: Methuen and Company.

Schlesinger, P. and Tumber, H. (1994) Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Schlesinger, P. and Murdock, G. (1991) ‘The Media Politics of Crime and Criminal Justice’, British Journal of Sociology , Volume 42, Number 3, pages 397–420.

Scraton, P. (2004) ‘Streets of Terror: Marginalisation, Criminalisation and Moral Renewal’, Social Justice , Volume 3, Numbers 1–2, pages 130–158.

Scraton, P. (2008) ‘The Criminalisation and Punishment of Children and Young People: Introduction’, in P. Scraton (ed.) Current Issues in Criminal Justice , Volume 20, Number 1, pages 1–13.

Shawcross, W. (1992) Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus , London: Random House.

Sheptycki, J. (2003) ‘Against Transnational Organized Crime’, in M. E. Beare (ed.) Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering and Corruption , Canada: University of Toronto Press, pages 120–144.

Shipman, M. (2002) ‘The Penalty Is Death’: US Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions , Missouri, USA: University of Missouri Press.

Silverstone, R. (1999a) Why Study the Media? London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Silverstone, R. (1999b) Television and Everyday Life . London: Routledge.

Simpson, B. (1997) ‘Youth Crime, the Media and Moral Panic’, in J. Bessant and R. Hil (eds.) Youth Crime and the Media: Media Representations of and Reactions to Young People in Relation to Law and Order , Hobart, Australia: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, pages 9–16.

Slattery, M. (2003) Key Ideas in Sociology , Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes Limited.

Springhall, J. (2008) ‘“The Monsters Next Door: What Made Them Do It?” Moral Panics Over the Causes of High School Multiple Shootings (Notably Columbine)’, in Krinsky, C. (ed.) Moral Panics Over Contemporary Children and Youth , Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pages 47–70.

Surette, R. (1998) Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities (Second Edition), California, USA: Wadsworth.

Tait, R. (2012) ‘Never Waste a Good Crisis: The British Phone Hacking Scandal and Its Implications for Politics and the Press’, in H. A. Semetko and M. Scammell (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 518–527.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Tannebaum, F. (1938) Crime and the Community , New York: Columbia University Press.

Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul plc.

Thompson, K. ed. (1997) Media and Cultural Regulation , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Thompson, K. (1998) Moral Panics: Key Ideas , London: Routledge.

Tierney, J. (2010) Criminology: Theory and Context (Third Edition), Harlow: Longman.

Tolson, A. (1996) Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies , London: Arnold Publishers.

Unger, S. (2001) ‘Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety’, British Journal of Society , Volume 52, June, pages 271–291.

van Dijk, T. A. (1991) Racism and the Press: Critical Studies in Racism and Migration , London: Routledge.

van Zoonen, L. (1996) Feminist Media Studies , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Waddington, P. A. J. (1986) ‘Mugging as a Moral Panic: A Question of Proportion’, British Journal of Sociology , Volume 37, June, pages 245–259.

Waiton, S. (2008) The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics , London: Routledge.

Watson, T. and Hickman, M. (2012) Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain , London, UK: Penguin.

West, D. J. (1976) The Young Offender , Middlesex: Penguin Books Limited.

Whale, J. (1980) The Politics of the Media (Revised Edition), Glasgow: William Collins Sons and Co. Limited.

White, R. (2002) Understanding Youth Gangs , Canberra, Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology.

Wilkins, L. T. (1964) Social Deviance: Social Policy, Action, and Research , London: Tavistock.

Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, P. and Dickinson, J. (1993) ‘Fear of Crime: Read All About It? The Relationship Between Newspaper Crime Reporting and Fear of Crime’, British Journal of Criminology , Volume 33, Number 1, pages 33–56.

Wright Mills, C. (1976) The Sociological Imagination , New York: Oxford University Press.

Wykes, M. (2001) News, Crime, and Culture , London: Pluto.

Young, J. (1971) The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use , London: McGibbon and Kee.

Young, J. (2008) ‘Moral Panics’, in L. Kontos and D. C. Brotherton (eds.) Encyclopedia of Gangs , California, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, pages 174–176.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Westminster History, Sociology and Criminology, London, UK

Faith Gordon

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Gordon, F. (2018). The Significance and Impact of the Media in Contemporary Society. In: Children, Young People and the Press in a Transitioning Society. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60682-2_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60682-2_2

Published : 10 March 2018

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, London

Print ISBN : 978-1-137-60681-5

Online ISBN : 978-1-137-60682-2

eBook Packages : Law and Criminology Law and Criminology (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

More Americans now see the media’s influence growing compared with a year ago

Americans’ views about the influence of the media in the country have shifted dramatically over the course of a year in which there was much discussion about the news media’s role during the election and post-election coverage , the COVID-19 pandemic and protests about racial justice . More Americans now say that news organizations are gaining influence than say their influence is waning, a stark contrast to just one year ago when the reverse was true.

When Americans were asked to evaluate the media’s standing in the nation, about four-in-ten (41%) say news organizations are growing in their influence, somewhat higher than the one-third (33%) who say their influence is declining, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted March 8-14, 2021. The remaining one-quarter of U.S. adults say they are neither growing nor declining in influence.

To examine Americans’ views about the influence of the news media, Pew Research Center surveyed 12,045 U.S. adults from March 8 to 14, 2021. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . See here to read more about the questions used for this analysis and the methodology .

This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By comparison, Americans in early 2020 were far more likely to say the news media were declining in influence . Nearly half (48%) at that time said this, compared with far fewer (32%) who said news organizations were growing in influence.

The 2021 figures more closely resemble responses from 2011 – the next most recent time this was asked – and before, in that more Americans then said the news media were growing in influence than declining. Views could have shifted in the gap between 2011 and 2020, but if so, they have now shifted back. (It should be noted that prior to 2020, this question was asked on the phone instead of on the web.)

What’s more, this shift in views of the media’s influence in the country occurred among members of both political parties – and in the same direction.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are about evenly split in whether they think news organizations are growing (40%) or declining in influence (41%). This is very different from a year ago, when Republicans were twice as likely to say their influence was declining than growing (56% vs. 28%).

And Democrats and Democratic leaners are now much more likely to say news organizations are growing (43%) than declining in influence (28%), while a year ago they were slightly more likely to say influence was declining (42% vs. 36% growing).

Overall, then, Republicans are still more likely than Democrats to say the news media are losing standing in the country, though the two groups are more on par in thinking that the media are increasing in their influence. (Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to say news organizations are neither growing nor declining in influence – 29% vs. 19%.)  

Trust in media closely ties to whether its influence is seen as growing or declining. Those who have greater trust in national news organizations tend to be more likely to see the news media gaining influence, while those with low levels of trust are generally more likely to see it waning.

Americans who say they have a great deal of trust in the accuracy of political news from national news organizations are twice as likely to say the news media are growing than declining in influence (48% vs. 24%, respectively). Conversely, those who have no trust at all are much more likely to think that news organizations are declining (47% vs. 33% who say they are growing).

Black Americans are far more likely to think that the news media are growing in influence rather than declining (48% vs. 19%, respectively), as are Hispanic Americans though to a somewhat lesser degree. White Americans, on the other hand, are about evenly split in thinking the news media are growing or declining in influence (39% vs. 37%, respectively). And while men are about evenly split (39% growing vs. 38% declining), women are more likely to say news organizations are growing (43%) than declining (29%) in influence.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology .

• Media Attitudes
• Politics & Media

Jeffrey Gottfried is an associate director focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center .

Naomi Forman-Katz is a research analyst focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Republicans, young adults now nearly as likely to trust info from social media as from national news outlets

How u.s. public opinion has changed in 20 years of our surveys, americans’ changing relationship with local news, introducing the pew-knight initiative, 8 facts about black americans and the news, most popular.

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts , its primary funder.

© 2024 Pew Research Center

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

1.3 The Evolution of Media

Learning objectives.

• Identify four roles the media performs in our society.
• Recognize events that affected the adoption of mass media.
• Explain how different technological transitions have shaped media industries.

In 2010, Americans could turn on their television and find 24-hour news channels as well as music videos, nature documentaries, and reality shows about everything from hoarders to fashion models. That’s not to mention movies available on demand from cable providers or television and video available online for streaming or downloading. Half of U.S. households receive a daily newspaper, and the average person holds 1.9 magazine subscriptions (State of the Media, 2004) (Bilton, 2007). A University of California, San Diego study claimed that U.S. households consumed a total of approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008—the digital equivalent of a 7-foot high stack of books covering the entire United States—a 350 percent increase since 1980 (Ramsey, 2009). Americans are exposed to media in taxicabs and buses, in classrooms and doctors’ offices, on highways, and in airplanes. We can begin to orient ourselves in the information cloud through parsing what roles the media fills in society, examining its history in society, and looking at the way technological innovations have helped bring us to where we are today.

What Does Media Do for Us?

Media fulfills several basic roles in our society. One obvious role is entertainment. Media can act as a springboard for our imaginations, a source of fantasy, and an outlet for escapism. In the 19th century, Victorian readers disillusioned by the grimness of the Industrial Revolution found themselves drawn into fantastic worlds of fairies and other fictitious beings. In the first decade of the 21st century, American television viewers could peek in on a conflicted Texas high school football team in Friday Night Lights ; the violence-plagued drug trade in Baltimore in The Wire ; a 1960s-Manhattan ad agency in Mad Men ; or the last surviving band of humans in a distant, miserable future in Battlestar Galactica . Through bringing us stories of all kinds, media has the power to take us away from ourselves.

Media can also provide information and education. Information can come in many forms, and it may sometimes be difficult to separate from entertainment. Today, newspapers and news-oriented television and radio programs make available stories from across the globe, allowing readers or viewers in London to access voices and videos from Baghdad, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires. Books and magazines provide a more in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has articles on topics from presidential nicknames to child prodigies to tongue twisters in various languages. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted free lecture notes, exams, and audio and video recordings of classes on its OpenCourseWare website, allowing anyone with an Internet connection access to world-class professors.

Another useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum for the discussion of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to the editor allow readers to respond to journalists or to voice their opinions on the issues of the day. These letters were an important part of U.S. newspapers even when the nation was a British colony, and they have served as a means of public discourse ever since. The Internet is a fundamentally democratic medium that allows everyone who can get online the ability to express their opinions through, for example, blogging or podcasting—though whether anyone will hear is another question.

Similarly, media can be used to monitor government, business, and other institutions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the miserable conditions in the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry; and in the early 1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. But purveyors of mass media may be beholden to particular agendas because of political slant, advertising funds, or ideological bias, thus constraining their ability to act as a watchdog. The following are some of these agendas:

• Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination
• Educating and informing
• Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues
• Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions

It’s important to remember, though, that not all media are created equal. While some forms of mass communication are better suited to entertainment, others make more sense as a venue for spreading information. In terms of print media, books are durable and able to contain lots of information, but are relatively slow and expensive to produce; in contrast, newspapers are comparatively cheaper and quicker to create, making them a better medium for the quick turnover of daily news. Television provides vastly more visual information than radio and is more dynamic than a static printed page; it can also be used to broadcast live events to a nationwide audience, as in the annual State of the Union address given by the U.S. president. However, it is also a one-way medium—that is, it allows for very little direct person-to-person communication. In contrast, the Internet encourages public discussion of issues and allows nearly everyone who wants a voice to have one. However, the Internet is also largely unmoderated. Users may have to wade through thousands of inane comments or misinformed amateur opinions to find quality information.

The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan took these ideas one step further, famously coining the phrase “ the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964).” By this, McLuhan meant that every medium delivers information in a different way and that content is fundamentally shaped by the medium of transmission. For example, although television news has the advantage of offering video and live coverage, making a story come alive more vividly, it is also a faster-paced medium. That means more stories get covered in less depth. A story told on television will probably be flashier, less in-depth, and with less context than the same story covered in a monthly magazine; therefore, people who get the majority of their news from television may have a particular view of the world shaped not by the content of what they watch but its medium . Or, as computer scientist Alan Kay put it, “Each medium has a special way of representing ideas that emphasize particular ways of thinking and de-emphasize others (Kay, 1994).” Kay was writing in 1994, when the Internet was just transitioning from an academic research network to an open public system. A decade and a half later, with the Internet firmly ensconced in our daily lives, McLuhan’s intellectual descendants are the media analysts who claim that the Internet is making us better at associative thinking, or more democratic, or shallower. But McLuhan’s claims don’t leave much space for individual autonomy or resistance. In an essay about television’s effects on contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace scoffed at the “reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes…. Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster with pictures (Wallace, 1997).” Nonetheless, media messages and technologies affect us in countless ways, some of which probably won’t be sorted out until long in the future.

A Brief History of Mass Media and Culture

Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the movable type printing press, books were painstakingly handwritten and no two copies were exactly the same. The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not only was it much cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation technologies also made it easier for texts to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped usher in massive cultural movements like the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. In 1810, another German printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media production even further when he essentially hooked the steam engine up to a printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed media. In 1800, a hand-operated printing press could produce about 480 pages per hour; Koenig’s machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing presses could publish 3,000 pages an hour.)

This increased efficiency went hand in hand with the rise of the daily newspaper. The newspaper was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans of the 19th century, who could no longer get their local news merely through gossip and word of mouth. These Americans were living in unfamiliar territory, and newspapers and other media helped them negotiate the rapidly changing world. The Industrial Revolution meant that some people had more leisure time and more money, and media helped them figure out how to spend both. Media theorist Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers also helped forge a sense of national identity by treating readers across the country as part of one unified community (Anderson, 1991).

In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new threat from the rise of penny papers, which were low-priced broadsheets that served as a cheaper, more sensational daily news source. They favored news of murder and adventure over the dry political news of the day. While newspapers catered to a wealthier, more educated audience, the penny press attempted to reach a wide swath of readers through cheap prices and entertaining (often scandalous) stories. The penny press can be seen as the forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids.

The penny press appealed to readers’ desires for lurid tales of murder and scandal.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major nonprint form of mass media—radio—exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than telephones and widely available by the 1920s, had the unprecedented ability of allowing huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people. Radio was a boon for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience. An early advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio were “a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” because of “a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes (Briggs & Burke, 2005).” The reach of radio also meant that the medium was able to downplay regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly driven and defined by consumer purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round (Mintz, 2007).” This boom in consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s and also helped contribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s (Library of Congress). The consumerist impulse drove production to unprecedented levels, but when the Depression began and consumer demand dropped dramatically, the surplus of production helped further deepen the economic crisis, as more goods were being produced than could be sold.

The post–World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by the introduction of a seductive new form of mass communication: television. In 1946, about 17,000 televisions existed in the United States; within 7 years, two-thirds of American households owned at least one set. As the United States’ gross national product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, the American home became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit; along with a television, the typical U.S. household owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all of which contributed to the nation’s thriving consumer-based economy (Briggs & Burke, 2005). Broadcast television was the dominant form of mass media, and the three major networks controlled more than 90 percent of the news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans. Some social critics argued that television was fostering a homogenous, conformist culture by reinforcing ideas about what “normal” American life looked like. But television also contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the nation’s first televised military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protesters helped intensify the nation’s internal conflicts.

Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a hold on the American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves having to adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and easily archived, and it allowed users more flexibility in terms of time—once a person had purchased a magazine, he or she could read it whenever and wherever. Broadcast media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed schedule, which allowed it to both provide a sense of immediacy and fleetingness. Until the advent of digital video recorders in the late 1990s, it was impossible to pause and rewind a live television broadcast.

The media world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of cable television. During the early decades of television, viewers had a limited number of channels to choose from—one reason for the charges of homogeneity. In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of all television viewing. By 2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of total viewing, thanks to the spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed viewers a wide menu of choices, including channels specifically tailored to people who wanted to watch only golf, classic films, sermons, or videos of sharks. Still, until the mid-1990s, television was dominated by the three large networks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster competition by deregulating the industry, actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts that left most of the control of the broadcast spectrum in the hands of a few large corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single market (up from 25 percent in 1982).

Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries

New media technologies both spring from and cause social changes. For this reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution of media into clear causes and effects. Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio become wildly popular because it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist tendencies? Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam engine, electricity, wireless communication, and the Internet have all had lasting and significant effects on American culture. As media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came with “a change in historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the way people thought about time because work and play were no longer dependent on the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset; wireless communication collapsed distance; the Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information.

The transatlantic telegraph cable made nearly instantaneous communication between the United States and Europe possible for the first time in 1858.

Amber Case – 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable route – CC BY-NC 2.0.

The contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph, patented in the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph, communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages; it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel 5 or 500 miles. Suddenly, information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of World Wide Web. In this way, the telegraph acted as the precursor to much of the technology that followed, including the telephone, radio, television, and Internet. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing nearly instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times described it as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given to the sphere of human activity.”

Not long afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the development of radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension of telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola Tesla, were involved in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-born Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first practical wireless radio system. Many people were fascinated by this new invention. Early radio was used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the home. The burgeoning interest in radio inspired hundreds of applications for broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news outlets, retail stores, schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926, they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had risen to 30 percent.

Gone With the Wind defeated The Wizard of Oz to become the first color film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1939.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain; Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In addition to the breakthroughs in audio broadcasting, inventors in the 1800s made significant advances in visual media. The 19th-century development of photographic technologies would lead to the later innovations of cinema and television. As with wireless technology, several inventors independently created a form of photography at the same time, among them the French inventors Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre and the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In the United States, George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888, anticipating that Americans would welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera into their homes as they had with the radio and telephone. Moving pictures were first seen around the turn of the century, with the first U.S. projection-hall opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood had already created its first stars, most notably Charlie Chaplin; by the end of the 1930s, Americans were watching color films with full sound, including Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz .

Television—which consists of an image being converted to electrical impulses, transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into images—existed before World War II, but gained mainstream popularity in the 1950s. In 1947, there were 178,000 television sets made in the United States; 5 years later, 15 million were made. Radio, cinema, and live theater declined because the new medium allowed viewers to be entertained with sound and moving pictures in their homes. In the United States, competing commercial stations (including the radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC) meant that commercial-driven programming dominated. In Great Britain, the government managed broadcasting through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Funding was driven by licensing fees instead of advertisements. In contrast to the U.S. system, the BBC strictly regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired. However, U.S. television (and its increasingly powerful networks) still dominated. By the beginning of 1955, there were around 36 million television sets in the United States, but only 4.8 million in all of Europe. Important national events, broadcast live for the first time, were an impetus for consumers to buy sets so they could witness the spectacle; both England and Japan saw a boom in sales before important royal weddings in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable computer was still a dream; huge mainframes were required to run a basic operating system.

In 1969, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major technological innovation would be an electronic appliance that would revolutionize the way people lived just as thoroughly as Thomas Edison’s light bulb had. This appliance would sell for less than a television set and be “capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate access to all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.” Although Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical machine, he was prescient about the effect these machines—personal computers—and the Internet would have on education, social relationships, and the culture at large. The inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps to the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of components could be carried on a microprocessor.” The reduction of many different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film, recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, is a force that’s affecting media today.

Key Takeaways

Media fulfills several roles in society, including the following:

• entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination,
• educating and informing,
• serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues, and
• acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions.
• Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled the mass production of media, which was then industrialized by Friedrich Koenig in the early 1800s. These innovations led to the daily newspaper, which united the urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19th century.
• In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers to reach a mass audience and helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, television boomed in the United States and abroad, though its concentration in the hands of three major networks led to accusations of homogenization. The spread of cable and subsequent deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not necessarily to more diverse ownership.
• Transitions from one technology to another have greatly affected the media industry, although it is difficult to say whether technology caused a cultural shift or resulted from it. The ability to make technology small and affordable enough to fit into the home is an important aspect of the popularization of new technologies.

Choose two different types of mass communication—radio shows, television broadcasts, Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and so on—from two different kinds of media. Make a list of what role(s) each one fills, keeping in mind that much of what we see, hear, or read in the mass media has more than one aspect. Then, answer the following questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• To which of the four roles media plays in society do your selections correspond? Why did the creators of these particular messages present them in these particular ways and in these particular mediums?
• What events have shaped the adoption of the two kinds of media you selected?
• How have technological transitions shaped the industries involved in the two kinds of media you have selected?

Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , (London: Verso, 1991).

Bilton, Jim. “The Loyalty Challenge: How Magazine Subscriptions Work,” In Circulation , January/February 2007.

Briggs and Burke, Social History of the Media .

Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Kay, Alan. “The Infobahn Is Not the Answer,” Wired , May 1994.

Library of Congress, “Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption,” Coolidge-Consumerism Collection, http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/inradio.html .

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Mintz, Steven “The Jazz Age: The American 1920s: The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture,” Digital History , 2007, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?hhid=454 .

Ramsey, Doug. “UC San Diego Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans Consume” UC San Diego News Center, December 9, 2009, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/12-09Information.asp .

State of the Media, project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media 2004 , http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2004/ .

Wallace, David Foster “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little Brown, 1997).

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Food and drink

The fermented crescent

Ancient Mesopotamians had a profound love of beer: a beverage they found celebratory, intoxicating and strangely erotic

Tate Paulette

Philosophy of science

Life makes mistakes

Hens try to hatch golf balls, whales get beached. Getting things wrong seems to play a fundamental role in life on Earth

David S Oderberg

Sex and sexuality

Sex and death

Our culture works hard to keep sex and death separate but recharging the libido might provide the release that grief needs

Cody Delistraty

Politics and government

The spectre of insecurity

Liberals have forgotten that in order for our lives not to be nasty, brutish and short, we need stability. Enter Hobbes

Jennifer M Morton

The script creator

Pau Cin Hau dreamt of an alphabet for a language that had never been written down. So began the religion of Laipianism

Bikash K Bhattacharya

Stars behaving absurdly

For centuries, the only way in which to illuminate the mysteries of black holes was through the power of mathematics

Steve Nadis & Shing-Tung Yau

Mental health

Constant confession

Mental health campaigns place huge trust in people’s ability to act as therapists. But when should professionals step in?

Aaron Neiman

The joy of clutter

The world sees Japan as a paragon of minimalism. But its hidden clutter culture shows that ‘more’ can be as magical as ‘less’

History of science

Forwards, not back

Medicine aims to return bodies to the state they were in before illness. But there’s a better way of thinking about health

Kate MacCord & Jane Maienschein

Human rights and justice

Utah is so gay!

The Mormon state is seen as deeply homophobic. Yet, from polygamy to pride, Mormons themselves are a distinctly queer lot

Kristi Rhead

Anthropology

Witches around the world

The belief in witches is an almost universal feature of human societies. What does it reveal about our deepest fears?

Gregory Forth

Subcultures

An undulating thrill

Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?

Douglas Small

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Parents' Ultimate Guide to AI Companions and Relationships

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Jewish Experiences
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

What is media literacy, and why is it important?

The word "literacy" usually describes the ability to read and write. Reading literacy and media literacy have a lot in common. Reading starts with recognizing letters. Pretty soon, readers can identify words -- and, most importantly, understand what those words mean. Readers then become writers. With more experience, readers and writers develop strong literacy skills. ( Learn specifically about news literacy .)

Media literacy is the ability to identify different types of media and understand the messages they're sending. Kids take in a huge amount of information from a wide array of sources, far beyond the traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) of most parents' youth. There are text messages, memes, viral videos, social media, video games, advertising, and more. But all media shares one thing: Someone created it. And it was created for a reason. Understanding that reason is the basis of media literacy. ( Learn how to use movies and TV to teach media literacy. )

The digital age has made it easy for anyone to create media . We don't always know who created something, why they made it, and whether it's credible. This makes media literacy tricky to learn and teach. Nonetheless, media literacy is an essential skill in the digital age.

Specifically, it helps kids:

Learn to think critically. As kids evaluate media, they decide whether the messages make sense, why certain information was included, what wasn't included, and what the key ideas are. They learn to use examples to support their opinions. Then they can make up their own minds about the information based on knowledge they already have.

Become a smart consumer of products and information. Media literacy helps kids learn how to determine whether something is credible. It also helps them determine the "persuasive intent" of advertising and resist the techniques marketers use to sell products.

Recognize point of view. Every creator has a perspective. Identifying an author's point of view helps kids appreciate different perspectives. It also helps put information in the context of what they already know -- or think they know.

Create media responsibly. Recognizing your own point of view, saying what you want to say how you want to say it, and understanding that your messages have an impact is key to effective communication.

Identify the role of media in our culture. From celebrity gossip to magazine covers to memes, media is telling us something, shaping our understanding of the world, and even compelling us to act or think in certain ways.

Understand the author's goal. What does the author want you to take away from a piece of media? Is it purely informative, is it trying to change your mind, or is it introducing you to new ideas you've never heard of? When kids understand what type of influence something has, they can make informed choices.

When teaching your kids media literacy , it's not so important for parents to tell kids whether something is "right." In fact, the process is more of an exchange of ideas. You'll probably end up learning as much from your kids as they learn from you.

Media literacy includes asking specific questions and backing up your opinions with examples. Following media-literacy steps allows you to learn for yourself what a given piece of media is, why it was made, and what you want to think about it.

Teaching kids media literacy as a sit-down lesson is not very effective; it's better incorporated into everyday activities . For example:

• With little kids, you can discuss things they're familiar with but may not pay much attention to. Examples include cereal commercials, food wrappers, and toy packages.
• With older kids, you can talk through media they enjoy and interact with. These include such things as YouTube videos , viral memes from the internet, and ads for video games.

Here are the key questions to ask when teaching kids media literacy :

• Who created this? Was it a company? Was it an individual? (If so, who?) Was it a comedian? Was it an artist? Was it an anonymous source? Why do you think that?
• Why did they make it? Was it to inform you of something that happened in the world (for example, a news story)? Was it to change your mind or behavior (an opinion essay or a how-to)? Was it to make you laugh (a funny meme)? Was it to get you to buy something (an ad)? Why do you think that?
• Who is the message for? Is it for kids? Grown-ups? Girls? Boys? People who share a particular interest? Why do you think that?
• What techniques are being used to make this message credible or believable? Does it have statistics from a reputable source? Does it contain quotes from a subject expert? Does it have an authoritative-sounding voice-over? Is there direct evidence of the assertions its making? Why do you think that?
• What details were left out, and why? Is the information balanced with different views -- or does it present only one side? Do you need more information to fully understand the message? Why do you think that?
• How did the message make you feel? Do you think others might feel the same way? Would everyone feel the same, or would certain people disagree with you? Why do you think that?
• As kids become more aware of and exposed to news and current events , you can apply media-literacy steps to radio, TV, and online information.

Common Sense Media offers the largest, most trusted library of independent age-based ratings and reviews. Our timely parenting advice supports families as they navigate the challenges and possibilities of raising kids in the digital age.

bottleflight Review

Whats Make a photo workshop great?

The Onsmo X-85 EZLock & San Fabian, Philippines

OUTBACK DUO LAPTOP BRIEF Review

Review: WaterField Designs' Air Duffel

• Photographers
• Depth of Field
• Digital Trekker
• 2025 Kashmir Valley & Ladakh Photo Tour
• 2025 Mentawai Photo Adventure (COMING SOON!)
• Ladakh, India
• Varanasi, India
• Puppet Masters of Penang
• Rickshaw Pullers
• More Galleries
• Testimonials
• Why hire me?

Select Page

The Multimedia Photo Essay: Photos and More

Posted by Matt Brandon | Jan 18, 2010 | 5 |

In preparation for teaching some NGOs in Iraq how to tell their stories through multimedia photo essays, I’ve been visiting many incredible sites that are the home to some amazing photo essays. I want to link them for you in this post. If you are a photographer and interested in creating something similar to these; analyze them, look at how they start, what makes up the main body of work, how do they end? I think you’ll find some amazing conclusions. I think you’ll see that the old concept that every photo essay has an establishing shot, a medium shot, a detail shot and a conclusion has to be taken with a grain of salt. All these elements are in the story, no doubt. But the first shot may not always be a traditional tell all, establishing shot. These days when I look at a New York Times essay often the first shot is what I would call “The hook shot”.  It is a shot that grabs the viewer, entices them, draws them into the story. It could very well be the best shot of the essay. It might be the establishing shot that sets the stage, but it will be so compelling of a shot that the viewer is drawn in and can’t leave. The other main factor in a photo essay is a given, but not always adhered to by novices, that is every shot must be good enough to stand alone. Every shot! There should never be a shot put into the essay that is simply a placeholder or a fill. Each and every image needs to be strong. In fact, the stronger the better.

Ideally the essay needs a plot arc like a good book; background, details, the tension and paradoxes and the conclusion. You will find this in every story listed below.

A photo essay can run from anywhere from five photos to 35 photos or more. There are no hard and fast rules how many photos you need. What you need is enough photographs to tell your story and make your point. Make sure you know your story. Don’t run down rabbit trails with photos like a bad story teller does with words. Too many images get complicated and you risk loosing your viewer to boredom.

One of the things that excites me about where the photo essays is going, is the advent of audio beds. It can be something as simple as random ambient sounds; chickens clucking, car horns honking, footsteps and voices in the background. But often it is audio of the subject of this photo essay adding depth to their story. Another trend, but I’m not prepared to venture into quite yet, is the inclusion of video into the essay. The best examples of this are found at mediastorm.org .  Brian Storm has made a home for the best multimedia in the world. It is quite common for one of the videos hosted by mediastorm.org to win an award. One of the most current is the photo essay entitled “ The Rape of a Nation “, by Marcus Bleasdale, documenting the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which is said to be the deadliest war in the world today. An estimated 5.4 million people have died since 1998, the largest death toll since the Second World War, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Bleasdale just won the The Anthropographia Award for Photography and Human Rights.

One of the best over all examples of audio blended together with photographs is the series being done by Todd Heisler and produced by Sarah Kramer for the New York Times entitled “ One in 8 Million “.  It is filled with brilliant images of Pulitzer Prize winner Todd Heisler, all supported by engaging audio and ambient sounds through out the shows. The shows are short, each averaging  no longer than 3 mins. The series simply tells the stories of people picked out of the crowd of New York’s 8 million people. Each image is an amazing photo that can stand on its own. In 2006 Heisler won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for “Final Salute,” a series of photographs, taken over the course of a year, profiling the funerals of Marines who died in the war. Heisler’s Powerful photographs combined with engaging audio makes One in 8 million unforgettable and a must-see.

Gojra, Korian, Pakistan attacks on Christian villages from gary s chapman on Vimeo .

There are a lot of other site that highlight this new and developing trend in multimedia. Here is a short list: viiphoto.com , Magnum In Motion , The Back Snapper , and Vewd .)  The last site I want to cover is a friend of mine, Gary S. Chapman. Gary works freelance and many of his clients are Christian aide workers. You must visit his website and check out his multimedia work on Vimeo . Gary takes the tacked of not using a simple player like some of us. He mixes his images and video in Final Cut Studio to give an engaging mix of video effects, video frames and still images for something closer to a Mediastorm production. Gary’s shows are short and to the point yet very moving.

If you are like me and find that this is a genre that you really enjoy and are finding yourself drawn to with every click of your shutter, then spend some time lurking about the sites listed above. Then join me in creating compelling stories.

About The Author

Matt Brandon

Matt is a Malaysia based assignment photographer. Well known as a photographer and international workshop instructor, Matt’s images have been used by business and organizations around the globe. Matt is also a Fujifilm Malaysia brand ambassador. Matt is a contributor to National Geographic, National Geographic Traveller and other major publications.

Thanks Matt the first paragraph broke down what I have been seeing to the basics. Sometimes it is really good to hear the basics from someone in words I can understand. I to am finding that I am drawn more and more to the photo essay and check in on each of the sites you listed once a week. Compelling and exciting works.

Matt, wow there's a lot of resources in this post. Thanks. I love it when you focus on multimedia. I surely want to do more. I anticipate you being a key contributor to the visual peacemaking collection that will be growing on visualpeacemakers.org when the official site launches later this year. (I really wasn't planning to plug IGVP here… but oh well, I sure did 🙂

Hey do a search on Phillip Bloom (vimeo and personal site). He's been in film for 20 years and is now doing a TON with DSLRs–artistic, experiment, testing, and stuff for clients.

Thanks Mario. Plug IGVP anytime you need. I am very aware of Phil Bloom. The guy is amazing. In fact I have been in contact about doing a Depth of Field with him.

Here are a few other examples of photo essays that were done by the Storytellers team at the Austin Stone Community Church. Steven Bush leads that group and assembles the photos from the team into these videos. http://www

I just want to point out to you that that Vewd have not updated their site for almost a year. They have an essay of mine. I can't get in my profile to erase the pictures and they don't answer any of my emails. I wouldn't suggest anyone to send materials to them for now unless they make a shift in action and attitudes.

Best regards

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

• uberVU - social comments - Social comments and analytics for this post... This post was mentioned on Twitter by cjrfoto: The Multimedia Photo Essay: Photos…
• LINKS LINKS LINKS class 11.28.11 | Multimedia Fall 2011 - [...] Digitaltrekker on the photoessay [...]

Feel free to leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

OUTBACK DUO BRIEF UNBOXING

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Surgeon General: Why I’m Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms

By Vivek H. Murthy

Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general.

One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.

The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours . Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.

It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior. When asked if a warning from the surgeon general would prompt them to limit or monitor their children’s social media use, 76 percent of people in one recent survey of Latino parents said yes.

To be clear, a warning label would not, on its own, make social media safe for young people. The advisory I issued a year ago about social media and young people’s mental health included specific recommendations for policymakers, platforms and the public to make social media safer for kids. Such measures, which already have strong bipartisan support, remain the priority.

Legislation from Congress should shield young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation and from exposure to extreme violence and sexual content that too often appears in algorithm-driven feeds. The measures should prevent platforms from collecting sensitive data from children and should restrict the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.

Additionally, companies must be required to share all of their data on health effects with independent scientists and the public — currently they do not — and allow independent safety audits. While the platforms claim they are making their products safer, Americans need more than words. We need proof.

The rest of society can play a role also. Schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences. Parents, too, should create phone-free zones around bedtime, meals and social gatherings to safeguard their kids’ sleep and real-life connections — both of which have direct effects on mental health. And they should wait until after middle school to allow their kids access to social media. This is much easier said than done, which is why parents should work together with other families to establish shared rules, so no parents have to struggle alone or feel guilty when their teens say they are the only one who has to endure limits. And young people can build on teen-focused efforts like the Log Off movement and Wired Human to support one another in reforming their relationship with social media and navigating online environments safely.

Others must help, too. Public health leaders should demand healthy digital environments for young people. Doctors, nurses and other clinicians should raise the issue of social media with kids and parents and guide them toward safer practices. And the federal Kids Online Health & Safety Task Force must continue its leadership in bringing together the best minds from inside and outside government to recommend changes that will make social media safer for our children.

One of the worst things for a parent is to know your children are in danger yet be unable to do anything about it. That is how parents tell me they feel when it comes to social media — helpless and alone in the face of toxic content and hidden harms. I think about Lori, a woman from Colorado who fought back tears as she told me about her teenage daughter, who took her life after being bullied on social media. Lori had been diligent, monitoring her daughter’s accounts and phone daily, but harm still found her child.

There is no seatbelt for parents to click, no helmet to snap in place, no assurance that trusted experts have investigated and ensured that these platforms are safe for our kids. There are just parents and their children, trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world.

Parents aren’t the only ones yearning for solutions. Last fall, I gathered with students to talk about mental health and loneliness. As often happens in such gatherings, they raised the issue of social media.

After they talked about what they liked about social media — a way to stay in touch with old friends, find communities of shared identity and express themselves creatively — a young woman named Tina raised her hand. “I just don’t feel good when I use social media,” she said softly, a hint of embarrassment in her voice. Her confession opened the door for her classmates. One by one, they spoke about their experiences with social media: the endless comparison with other people that shredded their self-esteem, the feeling of being addicted and unable to set limits and the difficulty having real conversations on platforms that too often fostered outrage and bullying. There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it.

As a father of a 6- and a 7-year-old who have already asked about social media, I worry about how my wife and I will know when to let them have accounts. How will we monitor their activity, given the increasingly sophisticated techniques for concealing it? How will we know if our children are being exposed to harmful content or dangerous people? It’s no wonder that when it comes to managing social media for their kids, so many parents are feeling stress and anxiety — and even shame.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Faced with high levels of car-accident-related deaths in the mid- to late 20th century, lawmakers successfully demanded seatbelts, airbags, crash testing and a host of other measures that ultimately made cars safer. This January the F.A.A. grounded about 170 planes when a door plug came off one Boeing 737 Max 9 while the plane was in the air. And the following month, a massive recall of dairy products was conducted because of a listeria contamination that claimed two lives.

Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food? These harms are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency or accountability.

The moral test of any society is how well it protects its children. Students like Tina and mothers like Lori do not want to be told that change takes time, that the issue is too complicated or that the status quo is too hard to alter. We have the expertise, resources and tools to make social media safe for our kids. Now is the time to summon the will to act. Our children’s well-being is at stake.

Vivek H. Murthy is the surgeon general and vice admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. He was also the surgeon general in the Obama administration.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Parents.com reveals Best Toy Awards winners for 2024

• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show
• TODAY Plaza

A principal thought a fight broke out on the intercom. She didn't read the drama club’s email.

A high school drama department put on one heck of a performance ... and almost gave their assistant principal a heart attack.

To promote their fall production of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” two students decided to pull an attention-grabbing prank during morning announcements. The gist: Cast members Grace McGuire and Larkin McNeil would get into a drag-out argument while sharing details about the show. 

Theater director Jeff Sams was in on the skit, and messaged faculty ahead of time to let them know. Assistant principal Stacy Falcone, however, didn’t get the memo. Literally.

“Stacy had been absent and missed my email,” Sams tells TODAY.com . 

In a now-viral TikTok video, McGuire, 17, and McNeil, 15, are doing their thing and squabbling on the school’s PA system. Sams is there, too, directing the bit. At one point, McNeil pounds her first on a table to make it sound as if she’s harming McGuire.

“Ow!” McGuire yells.

That’s when Falcone bursts into the room — and she’s livid.

“Turn it off. You’re both done,” Falcone hisses. “That went to the whole school — everything you guys just argued about.”

Sams is confused. 

“Yes, I know,” Sams replies. “We did it on purpose.” 

Then it dawns on him.

“You didn’t get my email?” Sams asks Falcone.

When Falcone realizes it’s all a joke, her face relaxes and she lets out a huge breath. But it’s clear she’s still shaken. You can practically see her heart pounding through her chest.

McNeil and McGuire were also rattled. 

“I was scared,” McNeil tells TODAY of what was going through her mind when Falcone reprimanded them. “I thought she got the message but didn’t want us to do it.”

“I was standing there like, ‘What are we going to do?’” McGuire says.

Falcone laughs as she recalls flying into a panic and sprinting down the hallway.

“As an assistant principal, you have to respond quickly, you don’t always have the time to process everything,” Falcone explains. “So, if you believe there is a physical altercation — you go into, ‘I need to separate students. I need to keep everyone safe, and I need to do it as quickly as possible.’”

According to Sams, the Franklin High School drama club had been working on increasing their social media presence.

“I was recording on my phone because I thought it would be a fun video to post,” McNeil tells TODAY. “It turned out to be the perfect video.” 

Rachel Paula Abrahamson is a lifestyle reporter who writes for the parenting, health and shop verticals. Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and elsewhere. Rachel lives in the Boston area with her husband and their two daughters. Follow her on Instagram .

Mom's lawsuit claims Character.AI is responsible for 14-year-old son's suicide

I’m a psychologist. Here are 5 things teens should never do on social media

How old is too old to trick or treat?

The 2025 U.S. News Best College Rankings

Experts say AI is the new social media — and parents are not prepared

How to talk to children about shootings: An age-by-age guide

What does ‘no cap’ mean?

Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter Dannielynn debuts a dark wig in photos shared by her dad

Mom sleeps over in daughter’s dorm room on her first night in college: Sweet or selfish?

Who exactly is Gen Alpha and Gen Z? A guide to the generation names