Small Recovery and More Stress

Thanks for hearing me out the other day. I wasn’t at my best me. I’m still not at my best me. It’s interesting that I’m picking blogging up again at the same time that I’m in the middle of the worst week I’ve had in a while. I’d call it the worst year, but it’s only February 4th, so there’s still plenty of time for that to change. Yes, let’s make that cup half full! And top it off with a shot of vodka!

That’s a pretty good representation right there of where my mind is at this week. I’m scattered and stressed.. and above all, still sick. The world feels like its sitting on my shoulders right now, and I’d say I’m drowning, but since I’m so stuffed up it’s more like suffocating. The good news is, I’m in my second day straight at work! Yay! And I’m getting a lot done. Mostly because I have to pack it all in these tow days. I’m back to working from home tomorrow as it is Friday, so who knows how much I’ll get done then. One of my big deliverables for next week is basically complete, but I still have to find time to get the presentation behind it together. Trying my best to keep my head up through all of this.

On top of all the work/ school stuff this week, as I mentioned, my boyfriend totaled his car a few weeks ago and needs to get a new one. Which means he has to borrow money from me to make that happen. Another person to help and support. Here I go complaining again, but it would be so nice if someone could support me for once. I have way too much on my plate and none of it seems like it’s coming off any time soon. Another big issue is that due to the lack of time and now illness, I can’t make it to the gym. The gym is my happy place, where I can forget about life for a while and release some stress. I really need to just bang things out over the next few days so hopefully if I feel better next week I can get back there. Damn I need a break!

At least at work there’s no cats puking everywhere. Talk to you soon!

A Day in the Life of a Sick Mom

So today marks the 5th straight day of being at home with my almost two year old daughter Eleanor. 5 days straight. 5 days is a LOT. Last weekend Eleanor ended up with a fever of about 101 or so along with a cold. She obviously wasn’t the most fun to be around at that point, and my patience was really staring to wane by Sunday morning, after I had been home with her all day Friday and Saturday. And that’s when the cold got me. And when I say got me, I mean GOT me.

Please forgive me for being a bit scattered here. Normally I string together thoughts and words a bit better than this, but today I have a massive cloud over my head and the background noise of my Outlook dinging to let me know I have new email along with the screams of a toddler who doesn’t want to nap are really hindering the writing.

So a little bit of background for you. I’m pretty lucky in that I have a pretty good job that pays me reasonably well and also allows me to work from home. Usually I work from home every Friday, so I can spend more time with Eleanor. My mom normally comes over on these days and helps watch the baby and keep her occupied while I’m working. That part of the work-from-home thing works out great. The big downside to working from home is that you CAN. Which means there’s really no such thing as a sick day. When I’m dead as a door nail, like I am right now, I keep working. Which means, on days like today, when all I want is to stay in my bed with the covers over my head, I’m trying to occupy a 2 year old while still accomplishing what I’d be getting done while in the office. It’s actually much harder than going to work in the first place. Then why did you stay home, you ask? Because the babysitter’s kids are sick too. And I have no one else who can watch my kid, sick or not. My SO CAN’T work from home, so if anyone has to stay home with Eleanor, it’s going to be me. Double edged sword I tell you.

So I guess I’m using this post to reintroduce you to the modern working mother’s predictable complaint. Like.. why is it always us? Why are we the ones taking the largest amount of responsibility towards our jobs, our kids, and everything else? Forgive me.. I do sound like that crappy mom who wants everyone to just do more for her.

Oh wait. The cat just puked in the kitchen. Yessssssss.

You know, I normally don’t complain. Normally I try and go with the flow and not worry too much about all the crappy things that are happening around me. But I hit a wall today. After re-checking all of the major deliverables I have due for work in the next week, along with my assignments for school due Sunday (oh yes, I forgot to mention I’m in online school for my masters degree in Communication), I also need to recover from being sick, find a new apartment, help my SO find a new car since he totaled his last week, cook dinner and clean the house. Can we all have a good chuckle now? I could use one… along with some really good cold medicine that could knock me the f*** out.

So I’m going to stop there. A large number of you have been there before and will tell me to keep on trucking; things will get better soon. Some of you will say.. oh yes, another reason to not have kids, or not go back to school, or not take the more demanding job. But I guess that’s one of the upsides. After 120 hours, I’m still here. I’ll get done everything I can. I may have some emotional or physical breakdown and open a bottle of wine at noon at some point, but hey, I’ll get through it.

I think the baby finally fell asleep. Off to clean the cat puke, pull together a Power Point, finish my taxes,do a conference call, and answer 14 emails. All in about 2 hours. I am SO ON IT. I’ll try to be in a better mood next time I post. Later people.

The Power of the Media: Revisited

After re-reading my original post here on WordPress, I find that my beliefs and views on the power of the media haven’t changed much throughout this course.  I still believe that the media has a large amount of bias, and it comes through in every form and vehicle that is used to disseminate information. I also still believe that the media chooses to report on stories that have the “human interest” factor that drives consumption. Writers of media content play a massive role in shaping our views on the world, and as such, must hold themselves to a certain ethical standard. Hopefully this standard is such that it reflects the medical community’s Hippocratic Oath of “First, do no harm”.

Papyrus tent fragment of the Hippocratic Oath

Writers of media content may write their content for a large number of reasons, usually because they get paid for it. Should this change their personal ethics when creating this content? Should these writers’ respective ethics be a mirror of the company that they work for or their boss? Or should they hold themselves to a higher ethical standard and choose to write content that does no harm to others? As the media is so pervasive in all of our daily lives, seeing content that is ethical in all ways can only make a positive difference on our lives as individuals and also as members of a global community. This can only serve to change all of our lives in a positive manner as a result and perhaps even lend itself to the social betterment of all of us. If media content creators do the opposite, the risk to ourselves and our communities grows. Instead of improving our social environment, we will move down the slippery slope of media content only for financial gain. This shows why it is so important for each of us to become media literate and to teach our children to be media literate as well.

Media Literacy

Media literacy combats any lack of ethics in media content, If we are media literate, and know how to find the reasons why the particular content creator is sending their articular message, we take the ethical choice off of the content provider, and make it our own. This way we can protect ourselves against content that may be unethical. We are able to find the facts behind the message and decide for ourselves whether or not that content should play a role in the making of our own opinions or beliefs. By becoming media literate, we are able to decide for ourselves what is ethical and what is not and choose to surround ourselves with similar ethical messages. While it would be wonderful if all media content producers took it upon themselves to write ethical content, this is something we know is just not feasible for everyone. By taking the onus to become truly media literate, we allow ourselves to be the true gatekeepers of the media content that we absorb every day.

References

Baran, S.J. (2015) Introduction to mass communication: Media literacy and culture. (8^th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill

Kovach, B. & Rosenstiel, T. (2010) Blur: how to know what’s true in the age of information overload. (1^st ed.). Bloomsbury USA, New York

The Use of Multimedia in Blogs

Multimedia content can certainly enhance a blog in many ways. Using multimedia can reinforce the story that you are telling by providing different voices and showing differing opinions. It can also make the content easier for someone to read, by breaking it up and fully engaging your audience. By involving use of different senses through multimedia tools, your blog can provide quality content to your readers and help you to “create a single resource full of useful information that will engage your readers and keep them interested” (Smith, 2013)

Visual aids can easily grab a reader’s attention, and can bring closer attention to the written content you’ve included. Multimedia content can also make your blog more easily found by search engines, making it more easily found by people looking for similar content. In example, “any images that you add to your posts can also be found on Google Images”, helping to drive traffic to your particular blog (Smith, 2013). Other types of multimedia content you can add to your blog to make it more appealing are videos, pictures, podcasts, hyperlinks, infographics, social media, slideshows, and audio. Each of these should be used to enhance and not overwhelm your content. Make sure to use these when they make the most sense and also where they break up your written content. This makes both the multimedia content and written content of your blog easier to digest by your audience.

Also, you should pay attention to what types of multimedia you use within your blog. Some types work better with different written content. Also, you should be sure to not completely overwhelm your written content with multimedia. Having a video placed every paragraph or two can be distracting to a reader. You might also want to think about “going back over some old content and adding something new to refresh it” (Smith, 2014). Multimedia embedded in a blog can elevate your content from that of a traditional newspaper article to a fully integrated resource that provides the reader with many different sources of information. A good resource for different, easy-to-use multimedia types is the website Educational Resource Tools: Multimedia Tools. Take a look at this site to get some additional ideas.

A few sites with quality multimedia examples are listed below. These sites utilize multimedia to enhance their content and make it much more visually appealing to their audiences. These are very good examples of how to use multimedia content in different ways that I’ve personally engaging as well.

• http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/meraux_foundation_embroiled_in.html
• http://www.duckrabbit.info/
• http://www.multimediamuse.org/
• http://hollowdocumentary.com/

References

Smith, M. (2013) Why multimedia blog content is good for your website. Retrieved from http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/why-multimedia-blog-content-is-good-for-your-site

Sundar, S. (2000) Multimedia effects on processing and perception of online news: a study of picture, audio, and video downloads. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~dshah/blog-club/site/Sundar.pdf

Successful Blogging in the Blogosphere

I spent some time researching best practices for blogging and found a few interesting key elements to creating a successful and powerful blog. Blogs should be “used to help establish authority through content that adds value to your industry as a whole” (moz.com, 2015). In this way, it should be professionally written and cause no harm to yourself or anyone who has relation to it. Content should be creative and bloggers should take pains to “think like their users” (moz.com, 2015). A blogger should take the time to post content that their readers really want to know about and avoid going off track. Timing is important to a blog, as how often new posts are made can impact readership. A blogger should also ensure to provide content that is engaging. This can be accomplished by adding links, photos and videos and other multimedia to make the blog more interesting to read. Blogs should also be fully functional and kept up-to-date. A viewer of online content hates to click on links that fail to work or videos that have been removed due to copyright issues. These are just a few of the best practices I found in my research that can lend themselves to creating a successful blog.

In this post, I thought it might be interesting to look back on a blog I created years ago for the purpose of analyzing it for these particular elements of successful blogging. I thought it also might be interesting to compare the elements of this blog, created years ago, with this blog that you are reading now.  I created the blog “Di & Ang’s Excellent Adventure” (https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Di-and-Ang/page-2.html) back in 2012 when my sister and myself took a cross country road trip in order to share our trip with our friends and relatives. I feel like many of the best practice elements I listed above were reasonably well accomplished in my old travel blog. I wrote this for a very particular audience, of which I knew every member besides those who might access the content publicly.

I believe I posted content that my readership was pretty interested in, and definitely didn’t post anything outside of the scope of our travel. I didn’t get into musings etc. about anything besides what we were doing or what we saw. Timing could have perhaps been a bit of an issue for this blog, in that as the trip carried on, I was less likely to post as often. This was a result of inaccessibility to internet and also just plain laziness. I believe that on this end, I may have slightly disappointed my audience. I think that this blog was engaging and did have a lot of pictures that were uploaded to make it more readable and less wordy. These pictures also gave the reader a true visual of the places we visited along the way. I do see my tendency to overwrite happening here, as I have in many other places in the past, which distracts from the content a bit as well. All in all, I would have scored myself a good 70% of the top possible blogosphere grade.

I’m seeing many of the very same elements of my previous blog in the WordPress blog you are reading now. I believe the content is quality, but perhaps a bit overwritten. I think there could be a lot more multimedia elements to the blog to make it more engaging to my readership. But, since this blog was created for the sole reason of completing coursework, I feel like the content must be limited as well. If I was writing for myself or my business, I would have to take into regard a different audience with varied desires on what they want to see here. Timing of posts would have to be treated the same way, and be based on audience wants and needs.

Blogging to me is pretty much free-range journalism. Bloggers are not held to the same code of conduct as professional journalists, which can have both a positive and negative effect on their work. Perhaps bloggers should be held to the same standards as publishers, but this may alter their content and make it less free form. If held to a blogging code of conduct, we may miss out on the function of blogging as a journalistic entity all to itself with no rules or obligations to the reader or writer. Perhaps if we all held ourselves in life, as well as in the blogosphere, to some MORAL code of ethics, the necessity of having individual ethics codes for each part of life would be rendered obsolete.

References:

Burton, B and Greenstein, L. (2011, August 28). Food blog code of ethics. Retrieved from https://foodethics.wordpress.com/

Fiorentino, D. (2012) Di and Ang’s excellent adventure blog. Retrieved from https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Di-and-Ang/page-2.html

Moz.com. (2015) The beginner’s guide to social media, blogging. Retrieved from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media/blogging

Social Media Tools

For this blog entry, I’m trying some new media tools in order to give some feedback to you about ease of use, potential audience of the tool, and what tool might be best used by which particular audience.  I’ve used most of the tools mentioned on the reference page (https://aids.gov/using-new-media/tools/index.html#tool-bookmarkingNew), with most of my time spent blogging, on mobile communication and collaboration tools, wikis and social networks.

One tool that I signed up for years ago, but have rarely used, is Twitter. Twitter is a site for “micro-blogging”, and is a way to share short snippets of information (140 characters or less), quickly. I signed back in today to see where I had left things. Unsurprisingly, I have 0 followers, and am currently following 5 people and/ or groups. Twitter played a large role in Egypt’s recent revolution, by helping to ignite an uprising that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and the dissolution of the ruling National Democratic Party. I remember hearing all about how protests were being organized through Twitter, as it was one of the very few media outlets the government did not control. In this way, Twitter can play a massive role in helping to share information and news quickly and can help people unite across other existing borders.  The audience for this tool tends to be younger, and more educated. If you’d like to be my first follower, you can find me @dcfiorentino.

The next tool I chose was Instagram, a photo sharing site. This was something I have been avoiding. I’ve seen a lot of pictures posted to other social media that have been altered by Instagram’s filters, and I can’t say I was overly happy with the result. Things looked just a bit too fake to me. Instagram seems like it’s used more often by younger millennials as a way of documenting every second of their lives, whether it be appropriate for sharing or not.  My first issue with this site was actually signing up. I couldn’t sign up with my laptop, and had to download the app to my phone. Once I managed that, I had to log in with a different app (Facebook), so as to not create a new account, and then answer about 32 questions about who I should follow and who should follow me, along with any interest I might possibly have in birding or horseback riding. As I’m sure you can probably tell I won’t be an avid Instagram user. I leave it to my younger cousins with the patience to answer all these questions.

The last tool I chose was podcasts. I feel like I used to hear about people podcasting content all the time, but lately it seems as though podcasts are disappearing, most likely being replaced by sites such as YouTube. I chose to take a look into the podcasts of the Hill-Man Morning Show, which I listen to almost every morning on my way to work. I chose this, because this show is probably the only reason I’ve heard anyone mention a podcast in the past year or so. It was actually quite interesting to see the list of the show’s podcasts on their website. It’s very easy to grab snippets of the show to listen to, or go back to in case you missed anything you really wanted to hear. I was able to find a podcast from the other day of an interview with the Massachusetts governor, which was pretty funny, and I didn’t have to listen to the whole show to hear it. I think this tool is excellent for documenting sound bites and for referencing them in the future. I can’t see much use for this tool for the everyday media user.  Here’s the site: http://media.waaf.com/hill-man-morning-show.htm.

I hope I gave you some useful feedback on the usage of these media tools. All in all, my feedback would be to use Twitter to check in from time to time, but if you have something really interesting to say, you’re probably going to need more than 140 characters, so it’s a no-go. Instagram was hard enough to sign up for, so I can only imagine what it would be like to put a filter on every photo I take. Stay away. Podcasts can be useful when researching and documenting, but as a way of spreading information seem to be a bit antiquated. I’d love to hear your comments on this!

Observations of the Oconee County Observations Website

This blog entry will discuss the Oconee County Observations website and will seek to evaluate its quality and adherence to ethical standards and also discuss the author’s credibility. The website can be found at http://www.oconeecountyobservations.org/ . In a brief overview of the site itself, there are many entries and recordings of events within this site, dating back to 2006. The author of the blog is Lee Becker, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Mass Communication, and a Masters in Communication from the University of Kentucky. The site itself is made up of observances and recordings (including videos) of the goings on within Oconee County, Georgia over the span of time from 2006 to present.

In many points of view the author of this site, Lee Becker, could be regarded as a professional journalist. His education in itself shows a high amount of experience in this particular field, and his observances are written professionally and seem to be well-rounded in scope. Professionalism can perhaps be judged in this way, with both education and experience playing a role in accurately analyzing a person’s professional aptitude. This website in itself however is not identified as a scholarly resource as there are no outside individuals critiquing the content. Also, this website is not a reputable journalistic entity within itself, as the New York Times would be considered.

Becker makes it clear within his site that his “experiences and aspirations for the county have influences” on what he posts, and also that he “strives to be accurate, fair, and transparent”. He also uses links to outside content to help support his views and proportions, and attempts to “offer a balanced presentation that recognizes different points of view and portrays the people involved with respect”. In these examples and a number of other from the site, Becker does seem to hold to many of the tenets of the SPJ’s Code of Ethics. By attempting to show different sides of a story and also report truthfully, Becker seems to take his responsibility for this site quite seriously and with pride. Becker also encourages his readers to comment on the content he has posted, in an attempt to “apply the standards of accuracy, fairness, and transparency” to them.

All of these examples point towards this site being written in the highest professional manner. Though Becker does not work for a reputable news organization, it appears that he makes every attempt to present well thought and documented content and is willing to open himself up for criticism if his work ever shows any bias. Sites and blogs written in this manner can perhaps be regarded as professional, if not more professional, than those written by journalists for major  news organizations that are considered reputable. Authors for sites such as these give pause to those who might not think professionalism, good judgment, and accuracy in journalism can be carried out by those who do not fit the historical mold for a professional journalist.

References:

Becker, L. (2015) Oconee County observations. News and comments about developments in Oconee County, Georgia. Retrieved from http://www.oconeecountyobservations.org/

Report Now and Apologize Later

We have moved into an age of instant information. From Twitter feeds of continuous live updates, to the self-reporting of news on Facebook and other social media, we have become a nation that needs our news immediately. This comes at a high price however, as the accuracy of the news that we are obtaining can be unverified at best, and completely untrue at worst. This blog will use the article The F.B.I. Criticizes the News Media After Several Mistaken Reports of an Arrest by Bill Carter for the New York Times as an example of how the news media “reports first and apologizes later” for the sake of higher ratings and an increased audience.

The article mentioned above describes what happened in the news media following the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. Many different news media reported that a suspect had been arrested in conjunction with them bombing, citing what they referred to as “credible sources”. These sources, and the news media that reported them were incorrect, according to the F.B.I., who also “warned that such unverified reporting could have unintended consequences for its investigation” (Carter, 2015). This is just another example of the media running with a story before fully fact-checking its sources and information. This example also shows the harm that can come from this type of reporting, in that it can harm an in-progress investigation.

In this way, this type of reporting also seems to fly in the face of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. In particular, it seems to go against the ethics code tenets on “remembering that neither speed not format excuses inaccuracy, gathering and updating correct information through the life of a news story, identifying sources clearly as the public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources, and providing access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate” (SPJ Ethics code, 2014). Has this code of ethics been forgotten in the rush to be the first to get the story? What has happened to the accuracy of a story and its importance to the audience? Is society accepting of the idea that news material presented to them might be incorrect, but at least they’re hearing some sort of news? Are we as a society not accepting of the fact that it may take a certain amount of time for accurate information to be deduced? Is instantaneous incorrect news better that verified and truthful news that takes a longer period of time to report?

I personally believe that since we have moved into the age of immediately accessible information on a mouse click, we have given up the right to completely verified news. We can’t have both, and it seems that we’ve chosen fast over true. The fault for this lies in our own hands, as for the most part, the news media is giving us what we’re asking for. It does appear that some types of news media are attempting to go against the grain, and take the time to verify their sources, but these media vehicles appear to often lose the ratings race. We as a society have become much more accepting of the retraction of stories and facts, so that we have something to read to make us feel as though we know what happening around us. Unfortunately, I do not feel as though this will change much in the future as our need for instant information appears to keep growing.

References

Society of professional journalists. Ethics code (Rev. 2014) Retrieved from http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Carter, B. (2013, April 17). The F.B.I. criticizes the news media after several mistaken reports of an arrest. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/media/fbi-criticizes-false-reports-of-a-bombing-arrest.html?_r=1

Sources, Credibility, and Social Media

In this post, I will evaluate the article My Q&A With Work and Family Expert Joan Williams on When Work Becomes a Masculinity Contest by Arianna Huffington. The purpose of this evaluation will be to identify the sources used for writing the article and test them for credibility. In the article Criteria to Evaluate the Credibility of WWW Resources, author Virginia Montecino showcases a number of guidelines to help those who are doing online research “become familiar with various types of Web resources and the reliability of the information. These guidelines will be used as a test for the credibility article named above.

In this article, Author Arianna Huffington showcases her interview with Joan Williams, identified as “an expert on matters of work and family, and a Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law”. This article takes the form of an interview, and is based on the give and take of information between the interviewer (Huffington), and the interviewee (Williams). Williams references a number of outside sources within her answers to the interview questions, including a study on work weeks by Silicon Valley engineer, Marianne Cooper, a study of surgeons and the loss of efficiency by Kate Kellogg, and books including Dangerously Sleepy (author not named), and Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte.

Williams, herself fulfills the guidelines, of being quite knowledgeable about the material she is presenting in this article. I researched information about her, and find that she indeed holds the titles referred to in Huffington’s article, and is also quite highly regarded in her particular scholarly field. She was awarded the Families and Work Life Legacy Award in 2014, along with much other recognition in this field. She is also the “author or co-author of over ninety academic articles and book chapters, along with eight books” (retrieved from William’s UC Hastings online profile). This information proves her experience in this field, and gives a large amount of credibility to her knowledge on this particular subject. There also appears to be very little in this article in the way of bias. Every point Williams makes is referenced, and does not have the air of opinion. The information in the article is current, and appears to be well documented and researched.

The article itself was written by Arianna Huffington, a well-regarded journalist in her own right. She has “been recognized in various media outlets, appearing on Time Magazine’s 100 list and Forbes’ special rundown of “the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women”. Huffington is also recognized for “push (ing) a platform of individuals maintaining a balance between work, good health and life/enjoyment and has positioned the work/life balance as an important reform for companies to place at the forefront of their culture”, giving her additional credibility on this particular topic.

Blogging and social media have drastically changed the way in which we receive information about the world around us. Instead of hearing information directly from sources whose information has been vetted by newspaper editors and the like, information is now immediately released without verification to anyone who wants to read it. This leaves the burden of verification on those who are absorbing it, instead of the author. As our society continues to utilize and grow within this model of information transfer, we must take the time to verify the information we are receiving to prove its credibility to ourselves. Taking the time to ensure information credibility is truly the mark of a media literate person today.

References

Arianna Huffington. (2015). The Biography.com website. Retrieved May 14, 2015, from http://www.biography.com/people/arianna-huffington-21216537.

Joan C.Williams profile. Retrieved from:

http://www.uchastings.edu/academics/faculty/facultybios/williams/

Huffington, A. (2015, May 13). My q&a with work and family expert Joan Williams on when work becomes a masculinity contest. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/joan-williams-work-masculinity_b_7277660.html

Montecino, V. (August, 1998) Criteria to evaluate the credibility of www resources. Retrieved from http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm

Examining Media Use and Influence

My personal daily media usage is made up of a number of different sources. I spend time daily checking both work and personal email, accessing news through the online sites of several newspapers, sending and receiving phone calls and text messages, and utilizing social media through company webpages, Fusion (an internal company social media site), and Facebook. I also access SNHU learnings and content through the SNHU website and Blackboard.

Media reached me indirectly in many ways, including conversation with friends, family and coworkers, and through my company itself. The daily buzz of my phone alerting me to a new email or alert from some type of media brings me back into the media’s fold, even when I think I might have escaped for a moment or two. Media can affect the way I perceive world events in many ways. Whether or not the media themselves have bias (which they predominantly do, in my mind), they choose to focus on world news stories that have the “human interest” factor that drives the consumption of their particular product. In example, Baran, in his book Introduction to Mass Communication, points out how CNN had 50 people covering the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, but assigned more than 400 to England’s royal wedding. (Baran, 2015) This fact in itself shows how the media lends itself to the stories that it believes its readership wants to hear. These choices, made by the media as a whole, lead to human consumption of what the media believe we want to hear.

In a very similar way, the media also chooses what we think about.  If we’re unaware of some particular event, because the media has decided that its importance is lesser for any reason, means that we obviously won’t take the time to discuss it and find out what is truly happening. The media provide us with the fodder for thought in this way. They give us the stories, and we shape them how we wish. We also have a tendency to choose to view only the media that we philosophically or politically agree with. This is the reason those who watch Fox News don’t watch MSNBC, and vice versa. We want the media to prove our personally held beliefs correct. People love to hear that others believe the same way that they do, whether religious, political, social, or any other facet of who we are. The media has the ability to shape our beliefs in this way. By aligning us with others and showing us that we are not alone in thinking this way, the media can reinforce these beliefs.

However, this can work in the opposite manner as well.  The mass media allows us to access many different beliefs and leanings that differ from our own. In this way, the media can help to teach us to become more globally accepting, by showing us those who may be different from us in some ways, but quite similar in others. It can provide for greater conversation and debate over existing social barriers, and give us the ability to learn more from others. This is only true if we allow the media to work for us as a collaborative force, instead of using it as a divisive one. In these ways, the media’s influence can be positive or negative on an individual, and most likely a combination of the two. It is through media literacy and true knowledge of media’s role in our society and others that we have the opportunity to shape our media to our particular values.

Kovach and Rosenstiel, in their book Blur, state that “through the history of civilization, there have been eight epochal transformations in communication that, in their way, were no less profound and transformative than what we are experiencing now; from cave drawings to oral language, the written word to the printing press, the telegraph to the radio, broadcast television to cable, and now the Internet” (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010). As we have progressed through these massive social and technological changes, we have drastically increased the amount of information that we have access to. Does access to massive amounts of information make us, as people, more knowledgeable? Perhaps or perhaps not. Perhaps we no longer need to learn and actually KNOW anything, as we can now search the Internet for information on any topic we desire. The question still remains, “how do we identify, with our new tools and options, what information is reliable?” (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010).

Baran, S.J. (2015) Introduction to mass communication: Media literacy and culture. (8^th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill

Kovach, B. & Rosenstiel, T. (2010) Blur: how to know what’s true in the age of information overload. (1^st ed.). Bloomsbury USA, New York