How Do The Mass Media Affect Our Lives?

Mass media is a particular section of media which is directed at conveying a message to common folks. The term ‘mass media’ is often confused with ‘media’ which means the storage and transmission of data. Mass media includes newspapers, magazines, blogs, pod casts, a certain type of books etc. – and it is around us where ever we go.

We wake up in the morning, look for a newspaper or turn on our television just to know what is happening around us. We go to school, our offices, etc reading advertisement boards erected on the both sides of the roads and remember exactly what was written there without any conscious effort from our side. All this is considered normal. This is how mass media affects our lives.

The most potent weapon of influencing people is the choice of language. Here are a couple of examples of how politicians use language (here English) to influence people:

Most of the people who read English newspapers or rely on English language magazines, periodicals etc as their primary source of information are unlikely to notice that there is a world beyond the USA, the UK their allies and their enemies. The space agency of Brazil is little known, why? Is it not doing anything worth knowing? No, if one tried to collect some information about the agency one would be surprised to notice that so-called space giants like India and China have no role to play in the construction of International Space Station but Agência Espacial Brasileira (Brazilian Space Agency) is an active participant!

This is only one of the ways, how the use of a specific language affects the society at large. Another example is given by an Esperantist (Esperanto is a language) Don Harlow, and it goes something like this: For a short time in the 1980 the government of Cuba permitted its disaffected citizens to depart from the country for the US. Relations between Cuba and the US are not friendly. And the official langauge of Cuba is Spanish. Thousands of Cubans citizens swarmed into the US. The English press interviewed some of them, of course in English, which only the upper class spoke and which already had ties with the US. The impression that the English speaking world got was ‘that the Cubans had choosen freedom over dictatorship and that they were really glad to have left their country and now they would do wonders in the US.” But the reality was something else.

The Spanish press—Spanish is spoken in more than 25 nations—interviewed many common Cubans and soon found out that most of them were criminals and had come to the US with ugly thoughts in their mind. People from those countries knew that the US had done a blunder but, we, with most of the English -speaking world were lost in our dream-land. It soon became clear, when the crime graph in the those cities, where the immigrants had landed, shot up.

Even today, we are led into beliving that English is the International langauge and not an international langauge. Because the BBC or the CNN still talk to upper-class people when they are not in an English-speaking country which creates the immpression that everybody speaks English and what we are being told is being told by the common citizens and that the information is unbiased.

Even in places which are fairly monolingual, there is an alternate weapon of choice: Repetion and propaganda.

Propaganda: means telling the general public only a part of the story but not the whole truth i.e. projecting what the government, a company etc wishes to project and not what really happens.

Here, in India, we are told that the Chinese attacked us in 1962, but Chinese students learn from their history books that it was India who took the initiative and China only acted in response.

Another common example is of fairness creams in India and Africa. The manufactures project their products in such a way that leaves an impression on the general public that ‘white-skin’ is a must for success.

Repetion means repeatedly bombarding a person or a particular group with information about the same product so that that product becomes a part of a person’s unconscious mind. An example could be of ‘Vodafone’, a telephone operator ; we all know what the song is, what the current plans are etc and amazingly we never tried to learn that! Merely the repetion on our television, newspapers, advertisment boards made us acquire that information!

The influence is so much that sometimes, instead of believing our common sense we blindly take for granted what the mass-media tells us and a famous play-wright George Bernard Shaw put it “Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization” . In short, mass media has both positive and negative influence on us but the negative side of it is more marked. Reason: television channels devoted to science, history can be counted on fingers but channels for entertainment seem to be endless. But as one says, media can only influence us and not direct us what to do, so the final decision is always ours.

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