Essay; Arguments with Research and Resources (FOR RESEARCH TUTOR ONLY).
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Media representations and how it influences its audience
Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Stephen D. Reese. Mediating the message in the 21st century: A media sociology perspective. Routledge, 2013.
The authors discuss various media representations of information, ideas, news, and particular topics among others. They also elaborate on how media representations affect their audiences, how the information presented by media shape people’s feelings, reasoning, thinking, interactions in day to day life among various activities. The authors also evaluate the difference between the firsthand information against the represented one with numerous examples. The various topics evaluated in this article include: the influences media content causes, how media is viewed by the audience, the analysis of the media composition, media content patterns, analysis of the individuals working in media occupations, how the media routines have influence on the audience, how the media organize their work to drive influence, the various sources that influence the media content and organizations, the media ideologies and what influences them.
The article evaluates the reality of the audience against that of the media representations. Media representations likely suffer from inadequacy in the way they portray the reality of events. Many times those people in reality of what is being represented get shocked at what they hear or watch from the media on the story being represented. The article uncovers the history of media frames together the audience responses. Quoting an example of a university president who was given a chance by the media to address the issue of racism in the school regarding the minority students, he wrote a speech instead of speaking which the students felt was not really, they were frustrated hence heckled at him making the speech over unlike its allocated time. The media later framed the situation as very bad for such a legitimate university because the students were naughty not respecting their president’s freedom of speech according to the president. However, the students questioned the role of media in the society since they were frustrated by the way the president utilized the opportunity in the wrong way.
The article is not biased and it is also detailed enough with numerous examples. It evaluates media representations as a process which is influenced by many factors which then affect the end result or the presentation that reaches the audience. Additionally, there are ideologies that drive the media framings and they have a standard in which they work to maintain. Sometimes the media is biased or present what the people want to hear but not the reality which influences the audience’s perception on the media both negatively and positively.
Perse, Elizabeth M., and Jennifer Lambe. Media effects and society. Routledge, 2016.
The article evaluates the effects of the media on the society or the relationship between the media and the society. It evaluates the media information presentation targets as well as the user-produced content. In media representation, there is the information from the realty that is classified as user produced but before it reaches the audience it has to be changed to fit the micro-targeted media. The article evaluates media as such a broad area which is very diverse. Media is not just the news presentations channels such as television, radio, and newspapers but also involve other forms of information sharing such as entertainment (movies, shows, adverts). Social media for instance twitter and Facebook among others. The authors bring out the subject of how much the society is committed to the media and the resulting effect. Media is an important tool for information sharing, making persuasion on a certain idea and it is very much used for mobilization and audience sensitization.
The authors further evaluate how the media environment has changed currently and traditionally. Today media is very present in the 21st century with the fast rate of technology advancement. One does not necessarily need to listen or watch a television channel to get updated on the ongoing events. There is internet which is a platform for many media types such as social media, channel streaming, online newspapers, blogs and many others. Therefore, with so much media presence in people’s lives, its representation definitely affects its audience. The article holds that media influence on its audience could be stronger than it is expected; it also depends with people’s exposure to it where it reached a point of addiction just like other addicting things.
The article is very resourceful, Media seems very influential because it shapes the people’s ideologies, behavior, social relations and interactions, opinions on different things and perception. People believe that media has power that is why businesses, individuals, institutions and the government has turned to media to be represented when planning to achieve something and communicate a great idea across. Media hence has shaped the society, institutions and organizations’ culture. The article evaluates four models through which the media influence its audience namely: direct, conditional, cumulative and cognitive-transactional influence. In addition, the society has created a dependency on the media, for instance, in times of crisis media seems very important in reporting what has happened with some uniformity and people have very much interest to be informed. However, the media being so influential, has contributed to negative influence on people on various topics such as drugs, sex among others in regard to children.
McLeod, Douglas M., David Wise, and Mallory Perryman. "Thinking about the media: a review of theory and research on media perceptions, media effects perceptions, and their consequences." Review of Communication Research 5 (2017): 35-83.
The authors in this article discuss on the perceptions of the audience on the media as well as the media perceptions and their effect on the audience. The paper first evaluates the perceptions attached to the media itself. Media perceptions, framing or representation can be found into two categories: one is the trustworthy or credible representations and the biased representations. The consequences of each type of representations are clearly discussed. The second part of the paper evaluates the media effects perceptions which is also known as the presumed influence and their repercussions. The major objective of the paper is to examine the media representations or perceptions effects as well as the citizen’s media perception.
The areas that are exhaustively examined include: the credibility of the media or the trustworthiness of its perceptions, media perceptions which are hostile, press inference which is persuasive and perceptions from a third party perspective.it further evaluates the processes contributing to media perceptions as well as the psychological processes that shape the perceptions of media influences such as selectivity, self-categorization, stereotyping, negative and optimistic bias among others. Media perceptions are viewed as hostile when the individuals are forced to understand the media bias to be in conflict with their personal interests due to the ideological predispositions. Persuasive press inference are the media effects assumptions which are in line with the understood media slant whereas third-party perceptions refers to the situation where individual view others being more influenced by the damaging media content compared to themselves.
The advantages of the paper is its detail and being unbiased by looking on both sides of the media and the audience as well. The research is not a single person’s effort but several eliminating bias. It is also extensively researched by giving the two ways of media representations both with their consequences on the audience perception by the media. Some representations have negative consequences whereas others positive. Moreover, it is unquestionable that the media plays a very important role in the lives of most of the people in the world; there is also a notable rise of the new forms of mass media in the technological world which makes the presence of media more prominent in people’s lives. Some of the images and stereotypes created by media form negative perceptions of the media resulting to the hostile perception of the media.
Leavitt, P. A., Covarrubias, R., Perez, Y. A., & Fryberg, S. A. "“Frozen in Time”: The Impact of Native American Media Representations on Identity and Self‐Understanding." Journal of Social Issues 71.1 (2015): 39-53.
In the article, Leavitt and his colleagues evaluate the role of media representations in shaping perceptions of the society as very important. The media representations can serve to increase or reduce the social issues. Particularly, the article focuses on media representations of certain social groups and how that affects the other groups, their relations and daily way of life. In a society composed of different groups of people, representing a particular group more often than others makes the less represented groups seem minor and invisible or less important. The authors point out that the media representations affect the self-perception of a social group and how the other groups perceive them as well.
The messages send out by the mass media are explained as nearly inescapable part of modern life. The media displays and preserves shared ideas, images and social representations of the world. The social media provides an array of categorizations that entail how different social groups can behave or act to be termed as a person of that group. African Americans for instance, are portrayed as musicians and athletes and the women are represented as sexualized beings; a social group such as the whites, the middle class parties are represented with an abundance of positive different portrayals though, and another social group such as the working class from racial ethnic minority groups are portrayed with negative but limited narrowed representations. The major objective of the paper is to evaluate how the quantity and the quality of the media frames affect the identity as swell as self-perception for a particular social group ,for instance the native Americans , when such a group is underrepresented by the media.
The pros of the article is that it is detailed, unbiased and well researched on its topic: it discusses media representations as important in shaping how individuals act as persons; they emphasize on the quality and the quantity of representations as very important. Underrepresentation is what is termed as invisibility which portrays them as less important in the society. Poor representations also demean the represented in the society. Media representations are inescapable and cause indirect people perceptions on others rather than the direct encounter. The con of the article is its failure to evaluate factors causing media under representations.
Work Cited
Leavitt, P. A., Covarrubias, R., Perez, Y. A., & Fryberg, S. A. "“Frozen in Time”: The Impact of Native American Media Representations on Identity and Self‐Understanding." Journal of Social Issues 71.1 (2015): 39-53.
McLeod, Douglas M., David Wise, and Mallory Perryman. "Thinking about the media: a review of theory and research on media perceptions, media effects perceptions, and their consequences." Review of Communication Research 5 (2017): 35-83.
Perse, Elizabeth M., and Jennifer Lambe. Media effects and society. Routledge, 2016.
Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Stephen D. Reese. Mediating the message in the 21st century: A media sociology perspective. Routledge, 2013.
