How Media can Manipulate an Entire Society
September 17th, 2014
Emma Griffith
Professor Luger-ASTU
Media and technology have expanded greatly in recent years. Media has had an immense impact on cultures and societies around the world. Social media especially has become a particularly common outlet for humans to share their ideas and thoughts. It has become a way for people to reflect on events that have happened in the past and rather than remembering these times personally, remembering them collectively as a community. I think that sources like Twitter in particular have played a major role in the way we perceive past events and either grieve or embrace them.
For example, take ‘Snooki,’ a character on a reality MTV show whose best known for partying in Jersey Shore. According to New York Post she receives 100,000 dollars per episode, so there is no denying she is a popular celebrity. In 2011 on the anniversary of 9/11 she tweeted to her 6.97 million followers; “Remembering 9.11 my prayers go out to all the families who lost their loved ones and all who serve our country! #Neverforget #fdny #nypd.” As a successful celebrity Snooki chose to tweet about a monumental memory from the past and effectively turn it into a community post that others could relate to, making it a collective memory. The questions we must now ask are: Do these tweets advance the discussion of 9/11? Does Snooki’s perspective on 9/11 then become the memory we all share? If so, is her motive here selfish or selfless? I would argue that we become more close-minded with to many of these cliché messages being delivered to us. By agreeing with Snooki because the thought #NeverForget is nice, we are failing to look at this situation from all the angles. Perhaps, for example, we are ignoring the perspective of Muslim Arabs who still face prejudice and intolerance today because they are judged based on their appearance or religion and are therefore associated with “Middle-Eastern terrorists.”
As Farhat Shahzad states in the article The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning, “human agents use these technologies within cultural, historical, and institutional settings provided by certain social groups or communities.” The society that we are apart of can easily impact our globalised views and perceptions of the people and places around us. We must be careful this doesn’t blind us from seeing certain issues from other perspectives as well.