14.07.2021
Lectured by Ajarn Phithaksak
Communication and media is one of the most important aspects of people’s lives. Communication leads us from the stone age to modern age. There is no denying that civilization flourishes from our effective yet complicated communication that conveys more than a simple message. How could we build a nation without everyone uniting together under the same ideology? How can pass our knowledge to the later generation? Communication and media are keys to these successes. Whoever uses these two elements wisely can express their thoughts, persuade others, and reach their goals.
To communicate effectively, we first need to know the definitions of these two terms. Communication is an exchanging of message or information to other people. Media is a channel or medium between the message sender and receiver. In addition, Communication has its wide levels ranging from intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, and mass communication. It is interesting that communication can also be in intrapersonal level. “We communicate with ourselves through dreams, thoughts, feelings,…” said Ajarn Phithaksak.
As far as we know, communication and media is great! It seems to empower us and allows people to do many things. Even so, there are five characteristics of media to consider while we continuously consume content from it in daily basis.
- Each media is unique in its own way
- Each has its own language. From what we can see, language used in newspaper and television shows are different.
- It conveys specific purpose. Reading between the lines can help people identify the underlying purpose of the media they are consuming.
- It has values and ideologies
- Media affects politics, societies, and cultures
The age of content begins with the coming of digital communication. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and other social media platforms allows message sender to communicate to more audience. Being an influencer, blogger, and youtuber has become a dream for many of us. However, as an audience, are these internet personalities trustworthy?
Internet personality such as blogger or youtuber creates a large impact to a society, as someone might call them “influencer.” Their lifestyle, fashion, and advices shape their followers’ perspective of life. There are both positive and negative consequences from their contents. The problem arises when someone turns blind on the negative impacts given by an influencer, defending and making excuse for them. We can assume that this follower believes in their influencer wholeheartedly despite the evidence proofing they have done wrong.
As we learn before, media contains its own value and ideology, and influencer does too. To decide whether they are right or wrong, trustworthy or deceiving is difficult to do so. There is a broad spectrum that everyone falls into somewhere. The right and left wings in politics is a great example of this. Most people choose to follow the influencer whom their value and ideology aligns with. We often find an argument online about the reliability of the information given to us, something we call fake news, propaganda, and more. People normally question other ideologies, but rarely scrutinize what we believe, or who we believe in. Therefore, we need to remind ourselves constantly that an influencer has their own ideology and opinion as a person, and they sometimes are right, sometimes wrong
However, in the marketing and business aspects, there is one thing to be concerned. According to data from MuseFind, influencer marketing company, 92% of the consumers trust an influencer more than the advertisement or the traditional celebrity endorsement.
This indicates that consumers consider influencer’s product review to be more authentic. Still, one of their incomes comes from product promotion.
In my final answer for this question, it is better to be skeptical at first. Question their trustworthiness, identify bias and underlying purpose, then decide based on the observation. Of course, there are trustworthy influencers out there too!
