The Dangerous Influence of Mainstream Media

At this age of mainstream media dominance, the world is likely to completely fall prey to cultural deterioration and brainwash. Thanks to the advance of digital technology over the past few centuries; the world is connected as a one dangerous global village. Mainstream media is the media platform responsible in facilitating easy and effective communication to the populous world. Mainstream media is however, feeding the once innocent world, with all manner of immoral information without the proper regulation an established oversight framework (Vaidhyanathan, 2012).

Mainstream music for instance, is openly themed heavily with sexual and violence related content. The millions of copies sold to the populous in the process alter the beliefs and culture of the viewers of the content, resulting to teenagers dressing inappropriately to look cool as the celebrated artists in the music videos, in the process end up disregarding their traditional dressing culture. William F. Buckley in his short story, “Why Don’t We Complain?” recognizes the need to for society to aggressively address such like issues to prevent collateral damage in future (Vaidhyanathan, 2012).

Mainstream media is wildly uncontrolled; one can only imagine the negative consequences it poses to the increasingly globalized world. Many societies around the world are already reaping the negative consequences of access to mainstream media. Hollywood as a leading movie producer in the world today is notoriously promoting bad culture to the viewers. The common themes incorporated in these movies includes same sex relationships, substance abuse, divorce, atheism, suicidal ‘fantasies’, explicit sexual content and heavy violence content (Vaidhyanathan, 2012). The unregulated media content are then played in numerous cinemas and television channels around the world. The resultant consequence is the increase of these social vices portrayed in these popular Hollywood movies, for instance; the number of same sex marriage is increasingly accepted around the world; Movie gun related violence is replicated in real shoot out cases where perpetrators are inspired by movies they watched and skyrocketing divorce cases. There is need for the responsible individuals and groups around the world, to raise a fronted voice to prevent the escalation of such vices to protect the society cultural authenticity.

Buckley relates the rotting society trait to the negligence of the train temperature control by the train management and lack of default oversight role by the passengers leading to ‘acceptance’ of the abnormality as a ‘normal’ occurrence. Mainstream media encourages global acceptance of universal acceptable ideology regardless of its positive or negative attribute. Grammy’s award and BET awards are for instance, fames the celebrated music and theater artists for their respective roles. The famous awards fail to regulate and encourage socially acceptable behaviors instead they embrace the movie directors’ and music producers immoral social behaviors, yet these are the celebrated entities and role models for the millions of fans around the globe. It is sad to note that the most weirdly dressed actor or actresses get the most public media attention. Gone are the days of sanity, the current world mindset is being controlled by mainstream media in addition to globalization and westernization.

Buckley is effective in advocating formidable directives or mechanisms that should engineered by the society itself to restore the cultural sanity to the society (Vaidhyanathan, 2012). The author illustrates the worsening political situation and democracy that have failed in protecting the citizen’s interest due to the laxity and inability of the people to take action. William F. Buckley has noticed the bad state the world is getting to due to lack of aggressive action by the society itself. Mainstream media is an example of a dangerous media platform that if left unaddressed will definitely erode the various cultural authenticities that define man’s civilization.

Works Cited

1. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2012). The Googlization of everything:(and why we should worry). Univ of California Press.