L.S. Raheja College of Arts & Commerce

Subject:

Media Studies

Project: Media Influence Society and CultureTo,Mandar sir,

From,Himmat patel

Sybmm: roll no: 50

INFLUENCE OF MASS MEDIAOver the last 500 years, theInfluence of mass media hasGrown exponentially with theAdvance of technology.

First there were books, thenNewspapers, magazines,Photography, sound recordings,Films, radio, television the so-called New Media of the Internet, and Now social media.

Today, just about everyone depends on information and communication to keep their lives moving through daily activities likeWork, education, health care, leisure activities, entertainment, traveling, personalRelationships and the other stuff with which we are involved. It’s not unusual to wake up, check the cell phone for messages and notifications, look at the TV or newspaper for news, commute to work, read emails, take meetings and makes phone calls, eat meals with friends and family, and make decisions based on the information that we gather from those mass media and interpersonal media sources.

The Role and Influence of Mass MediaMass media is communication—whether written, broadcast, or spoken—that reaches a large audience. This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth.

Mass media is a significant force in modern culture, particularly in America. Sociologists refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creates the culture. Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including TV, billboards, and

magazines, to name a few. These messages promote not only products, but moods, attitudes, and a sense of what is and is not important.

Mass media makes possible the concept of celebrity: without the ability of movies, magazines, and news media to reach across thousands of miles, people could not become famous. In fact, only political and business leaders, as well as the few notorious outlaws, were famous in the past. Only in recent times have actors, singers, and other social elites become celebrities or “stars.”

The current level of media saturation has not always existed. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, television, for example, consisted of primarily three networks, public broadcasting, and a few local independent stations. These channels aimed their programming primarily at two‐parent, middle‐class families. Even so, some middle‐class households did not even own a television. Today, one can find a television in the poorest of homes, and multiple TVs in most middle‐class homes. Not only has availability increased, but programming is increasingly diverse with shows aimed to please all ages, incomes, backgrounds, and attitudes. This widespread availability and exposure makes television the primary focus of most mass‐media discussions. More recently, the Internet has increased its role exponentially as more businesses and households “sign on.” Although TV and the Internet have dominated the mass media, movies and magazines—particularly those lining the aisles at grocery checkout stands—also play a powerful role in culture, as do other forms of media.

Limited-effects theory

The limited‐effects theory argues that because people generally choose what to watch or read based on what they already believe, media exerts a negligible influence. This theory originated and was tested in the 1940s and 1950s. Studies that examined the ability of media to influence voting found that well‐informed people relied more on personal experience, prior knowledge, and their own reasoning. However, media “experts” more likely swayed those who were less informed. Critics point to two problems with this perspective. First, they claim that limited‐effects theory ignores the media's role in framing and limiting the discussion and debate of issues. How media frames the debate and what questions members of the media ask change the outcome of the discussion and the possible conclusions people may draw. Second, this theory came into existence when the availability and dominance of media was far less widespread.

Class-dominant theory

The class‐dominant theory argues that the media reflects and projects the view of minority elite, which controls it. Those people who own and control the corporations that produce media comprise these elite. Advocates of this view concern themselves particularly with massive corporate mergers of media organizations, which limit competition and put big business at the

reins of media—especially news media. Their concern is that when ownership is restricted, a few people then have the ability to manipulate what people can see or hear. For example, owners can easily avoid or silence stories that expose unethical corporate behavior or hold corporations responsible for their actions.The issue of sponsorship adds to this problem. Advertising dollars fund most media. Networks aim programming at the largest possible audience because the broader the appeal, the greater the potential purchasing audience and the easier selling air time to advertisers becomes. Thus, news organizations may shy away from negative stories about corporations (especially parent corporations) that finance large advertising campaigns in their newspaper or on their stations. Television networks receiving millions of dollars in advertising from companies like Nike and other textile manufacturers were slow to run stories on their news shows about possible human‐rights violations by these companies in foreign countries. Media watchers identify the same problem at the local level where city newspapers will not give new cars poor reviews or run stories on selling a home without an agent because the majority of their funding comes from auto and real estate advertising. This influence also extends to programming. In the 1990s a network cancelled a short‐run drama with clear religious sentiments, Christy, because, although highly popular and beloved in rural America, the program did not rate well among young city dwellers that advertisers were targeting in ads.

Critics of this theory counter these arguments by saying that local control of news media largely lies beyond the reach of large corporate offices elsewhere, and that the quality of news depends upon good journalists. They contend that those less powerful and not in control of media have often received full media coverage and subsequent support. As examples they name numerous environmental causes, the anti‐nuclear movement, the anti‐Vietnam movement, and the pro‐Gulf War movement.

Culturalist theory

The culturist theory, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, combines the other two theories and claims that people interact with media to create their own meanings out of the images and messages they receive. This theory sees audiences as playing an active rather than passive role in relation to mass media. One strand of research focuses on the audiences and how they interact with media; the other strand of research focuses on those who produce the media, particularly the news.

So what?We need to be aware that the values we hold, the beliefs we harbor and the decisionsWe make are based on our assumptions, our experiences, our education and what weKnow for a fact.We rely on mass media for the current news and facts about what is important and what

We should be aware of.We trust the media as an authority for news, information, education and entertainment.Considering that powerful influence, then, we should know how it really works.

How media Influence usThe degree of influence depends on the availability and pervasiveness of media. All of

The traditional mass media still have great influence over our lives.

• Books once were supremely influential because they came first before newspapers, magazines, radio or television.

• Newspapers and magazines became great influencers after they were developed.

• Sound recordings and film were and still are influential.

• Radio and then television were very influential. As the 20th century closed, TV

Exposed us to untold numbers of images of advertising and marketing, suffering

And relief, sexuality and violence, celebrity, and much more.

• New and influential media-distribution channels have appeared in the 21st

Century. Delivered via the World Wide Web across the Internet, we are

Influenced daily by blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and myriad forms

Of content sharing.

How mass Media Influence works:

Of all the media distribution channels the most influential has been the television, we are constantly exposed to thousands of images of violence, advertising, sex, celebrities and much more, in fact a its known that a child is exposed to about 40,000 ads a year.

But who owns the media, which are the companies or people that shape our values, beliefs and decisions? The media is basically dominated by five major companies they are:

Time Warner VIACOM Vivendi Universal Walt Disney News Corp

Those 5 companies own 95% of all the media that we get every day. They own the major entertainment theme parks, entertainment movie studios, television and radio broadcast networks and programming, video news and sports entertainment.They also own integrated telecommunications, wireless phones, video games software’s, electronic media, the music industry and more.

Years ago there was more diversity in companies, but they have merged so now they are just a few and they have the power to shape the opinion and beliefs of us and our kids. So it’s important to be aware of what your kids are exposed to every day and you should also try to look at things from different perspectives and not just from the one the media gives you.

How does mass media influence young people?The media makes billions of dollars with the advertising they sell and that we are exposed to. We buy what we are told to be good, after seeing thousands of advertisings we make our buying decisions based on what we saw on TV, newspapers or magazines to be a product we can trust and also based on what everyone else that we know is buying and their decision are also based on the media.

These are the effects of mass media in teenagers, they buy what they see on TV, what their favorite celebrity advertise and what is acceptable by society based on the fashion that the media has imposed them.

There are some positive and negative influences in young people.

Here is a positive influence example, if there is a sport that is getting a lot of attention by the media and gains popularity among your friends and society, you will more likely want to practice the sport and be cool with all your friends. The result is that you will have fun with your friends and be more healthy because of the exercise your are doing.

However a negative influence in teenagers is the use of cigars by celebrity movie stars, the constant exposure of sex images, the excessive images of violence and exposure to thousands of junk food ads.

Young people are in a stage of life where they want to be accepted by their peers, they want to be loved and be successful. The media creates the ideal image of a beautiful men and women and tells you what the characteristics of a successful person are; you can see it in movies and TV. It’s a subliminal way to tell you that if you are not like them you are not cool yet so it’s time to buy the stuff they buy and look like they look.

Another negative influence in teenagers that has grown over the last years is anorexia and obesity. There are millions of adolescents fighting obesity, but at the same time they are

exposed to thousands of advertisements of junk food, while the ideas image of a successful person is told to be thin and wealthy.

Also more women are obsessive with losing weight even when they are not obese; there are many thin women that want to look like the super models and thin celebrities so they engage in eating disorders which lead to severe health issues and even death.

Effects of violence in the MediaWhen we watch TV or a movie we usually see many images of violence and people hurting others. The problem with this is that it can become traumatic especially in our children as we see it more and more. Our kids that are starting to grow and are shaping their personality values and beliefs can become aggressive or they can lose a sense of reality and fiction of what they are seeing.

In the past years there have been some cases of kids carrying a gun at school and even hurting others with it. Those kids have been linked to excessive use of violent video games and war images.

Another problem is that real war is used as a form of entertainment by the media, we should make our kids and teen aware that war is not a form of entertainment and that there is no win or lose like in video games, in real war everyone lose.

How media influence public opinionAs I have said above, the media has a huge impact on society and also in public opinion. They can shape the public opinion in different ways depending of what is the objective.

For example, after the attacks of 911 the media gave a huge coverage of the event and exposed Osama guilty for the attack as they were told by the authorities. This shaped the public opinion to support the war on terrorism, the same happened with the war on

Iraq. The problem is that if media received UN accurate information then the public opinion supported a wrong cause, this is the power of public opinion influence.

Other ways to influence are with polls and trends, especially in political campaigns. The candidates that can pay for more TV and media exposure have more influence on public opinion and thus can receive more votes.

The Impact of the Mass Media on Indian Culture and forms of CommunicationThe impact of mass media in India is very significant and this is clearly apparent through the rising number of advertisers who are capitalizing on these media channels to spread their messages. Rural or urban, regardless of caste and religious boundaries, Indians are glued to television and radio serials.

“Films are seen once or twice while ad films are seen over and over. Yet the advertising for many of these iconic brands doesn't seem to drive social change in behavior and values as strongly as some of the heroes and heroines do through their portrayals in films and serials. ”

It is the people and their characters that the masses of India seem to identify with. With regards to their dressing and personifications of themselves, mass media has affected the lives of people in many ways.

“Now village girls want to dress like Rani Mukherjee in Bunty aur Babli -- this within four weeks of the release of the film.” Men want a hairstyle like “Radhe Bhayya” in hit movie Tere Naam.

Binds, blouses, and bangles define the concept of beauty for girls in small towns - influenced by the looks of the saas-bahus in the umpteen TV serials beaming into their drawing rooms on various satellite channels.

Folk Music, television and cinema will be examined under the category of communication and entertainment. Communication in India often took on a musical tone, especially in the communication of religious works or literature. Poetry and religious texts were often sung. The advent of television however has made this rather obsolete. Similarly, village theatre and dance (nautanki) has been replaced by cinema and television serials. 

Social structures in India have also changed with respect to the caste system as Johnson’s work shall demonstrate. Owning forms of media and communication (televisions) has becomes more a more important symbol of class than caste. Similarly; village story-telling and word-of-mouth has lost its following and has thus changed the social structure of things as well.

“Traditional forms of communication and entertainment”The culture of India is one of the oldest cultures in the world and yet it is so diverse as to be impossible to pin down and define. The South, North, and Northeast have their own distinct cultures and almost every state has carved out its own cultural niche. In spite of the diversity, it's bound by a common thread as one civilization perhaps because of its shared history of colonialisation and the following struggle for independence from the British. Culture and its preservation matters a great deal to Indians, at least in rhetoric. The Government of India has even formulated a “Cultural Policy” which lays out three major objectives as preserving the cultural heritage of India, inculcating Indian art consciousness amongst Indians and promoting high standards in creative and performing arts. Unfortunately, it seems the advent of mass media has made the cultural policy redundant as performing arts seem to have virtually disappeared for the masses of India.

In the past, Indian drama and theatre were a significant part of “Indian culture” and some of the oldest plays in the world originated from India. The tradition of folk theatre was also alive in nearly all the linguistic regions of the country. In addition, there is a rich tradition of puppet theatre in rural India. There were many theatre groups that used to travel from village to village putting up small skits and these served as entertainment and also as a means of communications between different villages as information travelled through word of mouth. These nautanki groups have since been replaced by Bollywood cinema and the TV serial market. 

Changes in forms of Media and Communication:Music, drama and literature have all changed with time and are now digitally enhanced are available to a wider base of people. The television and print revolutions have granted access to these forms of media to the masses across India. Villages often have their own newspapers and access to television is readily available to the majority. Bollywood cinema is not restricted to the urban community and is in fact highly popular with the rural masses.The ease of making casette tapes and now compact discs has allowed for a very widespread distribution of music; negating the need for traditional folk singers and concertsIn Cassette Culture, how a new mass medium, the portable cassette player, caused a major upheaval in popular culture in the world's second-largest country. The advent of cassette technology in the 1980s transformed India's popular music industry from the

virtual monopoly of a single multinational LP manufacturer to a free-for-all among hundreds of local cassette producers. The result was a revolution in the quantity, quality, and variety of Indian popular music and its patterns of dissemination and consumption. Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture...

Television has had a more or less similar impact due to its widespread reach. It is nearly impossible to establish the precise number of people with access to a television set in “the poor world ”, as James Murdoch, chief executive of STAR TV Group told a cable conference in India; due to the fact that individual cable subscribers sometimes pass on the service illegally to an entire neighborhood. “Moreover, in parts of the developing world, large numbers of people often crowd into one house or cafe to watch television, a factor that is hard to quantify”. 

In the case of India, media empires have had to adjust their strategies to suit the Indian context. STAR TV realized that its mainly American oriented programming was only reaching a tiny, although wealthy, urban audience. It therefore started adding Hindi subtitles to Hollywood films broadcast on its 24-hour channel and dubbing popular U.S. soaps into Hindi. In October 1996, STAR Plus began telecasting programs in English and Hindi. In 1999, it claimed 19 million viewers in India. Another example of this cultural hybridity is Zee TV, India’s first private Hindi-language satellite channel. Zee was launched in October 1992 and depended initially on recycled programming. It then broke television taboos by broadcasting programs about sex, relationships, and horoscopes. The channel thrives on a mixture of Hindi film, serials, musical countdowns, and quiz contests. Zee’s innovative programming includes news in “Hinglish.” Despite the influence of the English language in India, the biggest media growth is in regional languages. Even U.S. series like “Friends” (known as “Hello Friends” in India) have been hybridized, although the latter has not been as successful as expected—the lifestyle of the Hyderabadi versions of the New Yorker originals did not settle in the Indian imagination. 

Such television shows are the prime example of how American culture has become more popular in India than Indian culture. Even Indian soap operas, set in traditional households often portray traditionally dressed women who behave and dress in a completely Western manner out of the house. Television serials, both Indian and western oriented ones have deemphasized traditional dress. As a Bengali fieldworker commented, in the cities it is difficult to tell men and women apart by their dress. Movies and television have created a new fashion that is being emulated all over the country, rural and urban. 

Changes in Social Structure: The people of India belong to thousands of castes and caste like groups--hierarchically ordered, named groups into which members are born. Caste members are expected to marry within the group and follow caste rules pertaining to diet, avoidance of ritual pollution, and many other aspects of life.

Caste lines have been blurred in the quest to gain access to information; which in itself is not a bad thing. Television watching, especially in the rural areas has become a communal event and it is not uncommon for TV owners to position their television sets such that they are facing the open door; allowing members of other caste groups to sit outside the home and enjoy the shows . Similarly, in villages where there is one common, government-provided television set, members of the village gather around to watch communally. This is especially the case for religious programs as well as those related to agriculture. 

However, such interaction means that traditional social structures have been destroyed and more people are flocking to the cities that they see on television in the hopes of achieving the material goods that are telecast. This has resulted indirectly in an increasing number of unemployed in the cities as well as a growing number of slums, as these internal migrants are often lowly skilled and unable to find suitable jobs in the city.

Other than changing the social structure and norm, the media revolution has also contributed to the disintegration of so-called 'Indian norms'. Movies such as "Monsoon Wedding" are an ideal demonstration of the culture shock faced by many young Indians today. There is a chasm between traditional values of chastity and dressing conservatively and the TV values of stylish and often skimpy dressing and more liberal values, including dating before marriage and other 'western norms'.

Although information and communication links that television, cinema, radio and newspapers have brought about are immense; it is undeniable that they have had a very strong and not altogether beneficial impact upon the masses who watch them. Culture and social structures have suffered, as have traditional art forms and methods of communication.

Conclusion: Other than dress; many other aspects of culture have been sacrificed in favour of western influences. Folk music and travelling singers have given way to cassettes and compact discs; nautanki shows have dissolved under the pressure and competition

brought forth by television and cinema. The traditions of storytelling have also taken a back seat due to casette playbacks of discourses and the ease with which printed material is cheaply available.

Just as traditions have gone ‘out of fashion’, it seems that many beliefs have done so as well. Television has reached a stage where even religious discourse is broadcast, negating the need for temple visits and religious-social gatherings. Infrastructure and the mass media influenences that it has brought with it have created a culture where person to person interaction has nearly stopped. Information is relayed to us through media channels, radio, television, books and newspapers. It seems almost as if we have entered an era of ‘cognitive imperialism’ where as Carolyn Martin famously commented, “Western civilization was the center of the stage play for which the rest of the world was an awestruck audience." The interaction between the media and the people it impacts is ever changing and evolving; the Indian-themed but Hollywood made movie, “Monsoon Wedding,” demonstrates how globalization and the media reveal striking features in cultural contexts. Societies like India’s are being affected by globalization and the western influences that are a large part of it, but their interest also plays an active role in fostering it. 

SocietyIn the last 50 years, the influence of the media on the society has grown exponentially with the advance of technology. Mass media is a major force in modern culture, particularly in America.  All lot of times they refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creates the culture. If you look in the past, first there was the post offices and telegram, and then they build the radio, newspaper and magazines, later television and now internet. Mass media is all about communication whether spoken, written or broadcast that reaches a large audience. This includes movies, magazines, radio, television, advertising, the internet and so forth. But how is mass media influencing our society. The basic function of media is to provide entertainment, education and news/ information. The most important function of media is to provide news and information to the masses. That is why the present era is known as the information age. People need news or information for different reasons, on one hand it can be used to socialize and on the other to make decisions and formulate opinions. Our world today is increasingly driven by a mass media due to the explosion of different means of communication, especially electronic communication such as satellite TV and Internet. The media is viewed as a source of power that influences, controls, and promotes

new standards in the society and reinforces the existing ones. As the media increases in use as our prime source for information and values, there is a great need to critically evaluate inherent socio-political and cultural barriers. This study is conducted to identify inherent socio-political and cultural barriers for mass media impact on Indian society. The study will help to understand the inherent barriers involved in mass media impact through conceptual or qualitative reasoning.

The growth of media as an industry has accelerated over the past few years with new forms such as DVD and the internet changing the way we, the audience, consume and receive media. In an interdependent and globalized political world, the challenge of the media is to provide extensive coverage of global politics and to examine the impact of these influences in specific national contexts. The mass media has a role to influence socio-political and cultural settings. Numbers of researchers have been conducting studies worldwide to investigate what they might contribute to an understanding of the economic and other factors that influence mass media, and how the media in turn influence the political climate and the democratic process in modern democracies. Mass media is considered one of the principal agents for societal development, democracy and good governance. Media critics claim that at times mass media has not played the role that it should have played and have played in the hands of few vested interests.