Since the beginning of the 21st century till now, technology has made significant and innovative changes that have changed many aspects of today’s society. It has improved and made faster all electronics ranging from phones to computers. But overtime, the development of media has been made to be more accessible to the bigger public with an objective of connecting the community. Media presents both positive and negative aspects of society. I agree to a large extent that the media controls the opinions and attitudes of individuals, and it is a complicated current multifaceted problem that will be difficult to rectify.
To begin with, the media, in all shapes and forms, has the control nowadays to influence opinions and attitudes to a certain extent that touch all age groups ranging from extremely young ages to elderly people. People born in the 21st century have been the first generation to be deeply impacted by media through phones or computers or any other electronic gadgets that gives them access to the internet or most importantly social media. The individuals who are less culturally, politically and religiously knowledgeable tend to be the most impacted as they tend to believe anything that comes before their eyes, because they don’t have the first instinct of questioning facts that are presented to them. A new phenomenon called doomscroling has significantly impacts mostly the Gen Z, it is the fact of being easily stimulated by swiping on social media that was first developed on Tiktok then Instagram and Youtube, who have all adapted these techniques respectively to keep the users for longer periods on the application to generate profit. Facebook, created in 2001 by Mark Zuckerberg, was the first social media that had an objective of creating a huge network of weak social links associating people. However, all of the monopolistic Meta group – Facebook group that bought other social medias ranging from Whatsapp to Snapchat – are putting aside the strong negative effect the application has on the users’ mental. These apps are detrimental for all users since it is modifying all of their ways of thinking as the content can be very persuasive and makes it easier to control and modify their thoughts.
Therefore, the use of media has established complicated knots that will be hard to untie. This global issue can’t be rectified by one solution as it was to be a multifaceted approach. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook and representatives of Tiktok have faced legal charges for applications’ wrongdoings, although they haven’t come to any solution apart from implementing a restriction of use in terms of hours that can be applied by the users who want to moderate their time spent of the applications or parents who want to control the time their children spend on their electronics. I don’t think this issue will be fully resolved in any time as the media has a huge role in our generation, and ever since its creation, has changed other social aspects for instance universities look at their applicant’s social profiles to evaluate a certain part of their application.
To conclude, the media modify the user opinions by using persuasive techniques as well as methods to attract their attention more on the application used and can generate a change of attitudes by making it more violent through video games. Media poses a polarised point of view on their methods of marketing and hence individuals of society are still discussing its impact as it is detrimental.