The combination of emotive language with video has led to a deeper global concern being injected into society, a recent example being shown by the many commentaries within the Western world after the events of September 11th 2001. Ecological concerns, movements for peace and democracy and campaigns for human rights have been given a fresh force by the global problems of the last few years, with America under Bush offering a clear denial of global responsibility for the environment, combined with an assertion of global responsibility as the world’s best armed superpower.
The next positive point controversially is the widening of social attitudes over the last decade through a hidden doctrine of positive discrimination we have seen a more socially diverse community of actors and actresses. In an attempt to avoid any allegations of discrimination this doctrine has allowed society to become aware of a wider society that encloses it, upon recognising the interest of its viewers the producers have gone one stage further, to include regular programmes focused on smaller cultures, leading noticeably to society’s acceptance and awareness of different cultures. One example surrounds the formally controversial concept of homosexuality; in my opinion a main contribution to the greater acceptance to homosexuality is the awareness that has been made through television.
A recent survey found that in a blind tasting people could not distinguish Coke from Pepsi. The two are chemically identical. However, the survey also found that when consumers knew they were drinking Coke it evoked a specific brain patterns in the experimental subject, which Pepsi did not. Therefore, Coke’s strong brand of identity has a measurable effect on the mind and brain of a Coke drinker – and a stronger one than Pepsi’s. What does this tell us about the media? For one, it tells us that advertising and marketing work, it shows the influence of the media in shaping our ideas, our preferences and our responses. This influence is inescapable as every one today uses the media for information and entertainment.
The range of media available increases all the time, as more and more people have more and more technologies which access media products; your phone links to the web, which carries videos, tunes and online newspapers; we talk all the time about the media we share. Media influences extend from personal life to the outcome of elections; elections are lost and won on television, footballers’ careers are made and broken, royalty rises and falls depending on a public image, constantly created and re-created in the media more fundamentally, our values and beliefs are subtly shaped by the ideology frameworks which underpin media reporting, TV drama and Hollywood film (to name but three.) Not only our specific preferences but out underlying beliefs are influenced by the media, in ways we are often un-aware of. This unconscious of our opinions and therefore our lives is the most controversial and most complex of media influences.
