The Way Mass Media is Controlling Our Decision Making

As a curious child, I was always fascinated with one of our key, fundamental living skills: decision making. Growing up, I became more attentive in the way in which our society functions and fundamentally of how our thought process functions. What influences our thought process? Who controls our thought process? Why do we do what we do? After much contemplation, one day a sudden realisation hit me, realistically we don't fully control our decisions. Our surrounding, our milieu, our background, all help portray a part in the way we think, however one significant factor can completely alter our thought process in a matter of seconds: the mass media. In this modern-day era, the media is everywhere. We are swimming in the media, we are essentially drowning in the media, we are living in a world saturated by the media.

From newspapers, magazines, our emails to our WhatsApp messages, the media has become the public’s most relied source of global knowledge which allows mass media to form the ability to influence our critical perception. Nowadays, the media has simply made all of us credulous people. In all honesty, we can’t even call ourselves people, we’re almost like zombies blindly trusting in everything we read or see. From our political ideologies to the clothes we wear every day, the mass media influences us all. In this day and age, would we even know if what we were consuming is actually affecting us? Now many of us think that we aren’t controlled or even influenced by the mass media. Hold that thought for just a second. We all think that only the most vulnerable people can get exposed or influenced by the media. We’re all wrong. All of us are exposed to the implicit messages of mass media. Now just, look at your footwear, that were recently advertised, the superfluous salad we ate for lunch just to keep our body image looking good or even the last president we voted for. These decisions are all influenced by the media and we have all fallen for it without realisation. In 1976, a large scale of research projects were conducted to study whether and how the mass media influences its viewer’s ideas of what the everyday world is like. The cultivation theory was then formed by Professor George Gerbner, in which the primary proposition states how the more time people spend ‘living’ in the television world, the more susceptible they become to believing the media's message are real and valid. Although, we all now know that the mass media controls the basic simple elements of our daily life, what happens when this goes beyond choosing what car to drive, what airline to fly with or which diet to desire.

The mass media can also influence the most crucial and critical decisions that we make. For example, let’s talk about a frequent drawback that constantly erupts in our nation's: Gun violence. Shootings have rapidly occured throughout our region in the last few years, more than a person daily has been killed. However, only some of these attacks have been labelled a ‘terrorist attack’. Those framed as ‘terrorists’ are conventionally Muslim or Islamic. This imposition name unfortunately leaves 1. 3 billion other Muslims held responsible as terrorists. The people of our nation have been wary of Islamic terrorists since 9/11, and this fear against an entire religion has only grown since then. The media has since used this act of terrorism to their advantage, and created a common enemy for the masses to rebel against Muslims. We won’t delve into the details of extremism and radicalism here, needless to say, that Islam, as a belief system, played no part in 9/11, it was an act of separate religious fanaticism. But that’s not how the media portrayed it; they turned this event into anti-religious propaganda which has persisted for a decade and a half until today, to the extent that Islam has become synonymous with terrorism. There's even now a word for intense dislike for fear of Islam: Islamophobia. How can us, humans be this contempt? Did you know caucasian American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners? However, usually many Republican associated media group ignore/censor certain pieces of information that go against their agendas as they are an anti-migrant and anti-Islam as a whole. A black shooter leaves an entire race guilty, a Muslim shooter leaves an entire religion guilty and a white shooter simply leaves no negative imprint. Another example was Brexit, which was largely dependant on the mass media targeting the high levels of Islamic immigration into Britain.

The media straight away began using this to claim that these immigrants allegedly aggravate the social stability of the U. K - taking away job opportunities, undercutting wages of British citizens and what not. Consequently, this unanticipated thought of one of the most powerful nations in the EU deciding to leave has triggered enormous seismic waves across the society. The mass media has become, not a medium of education, but a puppet string through which the powers of shifting our perspectives and manufacture public consent to meet their needs. Although there are many benefits of the mass media, only a few news channels remain unbiased. Take a step back, and don't believe in everything you see.