As we enter the digital era, there are more options than traditional media to exchange ideas and theories and communicate thoughts. Out of the offered options, television is considered the most effective medium, with books and film being the second and third, respectively.
Television, as a product of the third industrial revolution, takes advantage of electromagnetic waves to pass information such as news, announcements, and alarms swiftly across the globe. The advantages of television consist of the following: 1. wide reach of audiences; 2. quick spread of information. As TV is a standardized industrial product, people around the globe can easily access the service it provides. For instance, even in the most impoverished region, residents could sit in a pub and listen to a speech delivered by their president. Citizens of other countries can also judge the president’s political stance by simply watching TV. However, TV can also be a means to spread misinformation or rumors and lead to undesirable consequences.
Books, being the oldest medium to broadcast ideas, have multiple advantages. Books are the perfect container for long and consistent expression of complex ideas. One could enjoy, to the full extent, the process of creating, elaborating, and concluding a particular theory on some topic. Nonetheless, books nowadays are not as popular as other media. One of the disadvantages may be the environmental concern. It could cause deforestation because paper, the essential ingredient for books, is made of trees. It can be argued that books are against what environmentalists expect for the future.
Film, which is an art of sharing emotions, sees its advantage in giving a first-person experience. Consumers can acquire strong emotional feelings by putting themselves in the shoes of the characters in a film. Through the excitation of empathy, film can infuse the editors’ ideas into the audience. Nevertheless, film can also bear subjective opinions or even lead to biases against certain groups of people. A good example of unconscious bias is how certain ethnicities are portrayed in Hollywood films.
To conclude, the most effective medium to communicate information is television. TV features its swiftness in passing information but falls short because of the potential to spread undesirable misinformation. Books are a good container for lengthy, logically consistent development of theories, which comes at the cost of felling trees. Films are also a good medium to pass on emotion, but they could strengthen stereotypes about subgroups of the population.