Essay

In the last years the media have been the centre of our culture, the main canal of information in our time and, therefore, media can be considered the pillar of globalization. And for this reason many people have been asking themselves does society control the media or is the media controlling us? You may think that what you see on TV or on the newspapers may not have such an impact in your daily life or in your way of thinking, but is this completely true?; do media have this capacity to shape people according to what is the medium message? Through this essay I will be discussing the possible answer to these questions.

First if it’s true that media can control people thoughts and action in what we can see this? A clear example of the impact that the media has in us are advertisements, because advertisements are made to, to “convince” the audience that they should buy their products. But what they are really doing is controlling people thoughts by introducing in their minds catchy phrases and images that would make them buy their product. This is what ads try to do on people: that they should thing their services are the best and that they should use them, this is clearly a way where the media is controlling the way people is thinking.

Also the impact that the media has in the way that people is thinking is the news. When you see the new in TV the information that the announcer is giving is changing the way you are thinking. The human mind is like a computer, it works according to the information that it has. So when you are seeing something in the new that’s false but the news show this as something that entirely real and gives facts to give the new veracity, you as a person is going to think this false information is true and it may have change your way of thinking. Example of this is when a country is under a dictatorial government. You may be thinking what’s this has to do with media; it is visible that in a dictatorship one of the first things that the government take control of is all type of informational mediums because of the impact they have in society. In a dictatorship one of the worst things they want to have is an ideology that goes against the dictatorship this is way in this case the government censors the media and gives false news in some cases so they could shape people into what they like.

 There are many cases of people that were people that supported the dictatorship but when this government ended and they notify the abuses the dictatorships did to some people they wish they never had thought that the dictatorship was good.  A real case of this is what happened in Chile during the “Golpe de Estado” of Augusto Pinochet where many Chileans claim the dictatorial government, but they did not realized that the government was breaking the humans rights of many people along the country, as Guillermo Ramirez said to tv 13 referring to the violation of the humans right during the military government “Había gente que trabajó en el gobierno de Pinochet y nunca vio nada" “There were people that worked in Pinochet´s government that never saw nothing”.

On the other hand there you also can say that the media do not control our thought as the previous arguments said. What it is said to support this idea is that at last we are the one who decide what to think and to do, so in this case the media does not have a control of our mind because we are free to think what we want to, and if we saw an advertisement we are not necessarily going to buy this product and if we do is because we decided to buy it not cause the media told us to do it.

In conclusion after seeing the different point of view to answer the initial questions of the essay I think that the media does have a really important impact in the way society thinks. But of course I also share that we as persons have the last word, the media is huge factor to consider when we ask ourselves what the way society sees the world. So finally I can say I think that the media has the capacity to control minds.