10 Media Literacy Topics That Changed My Perception of the Media
Media is basically synonymous with the human race nowadays. Whether you’re on your phone scrolling through social media, driving in your car and seeing a billboard, or listening to music while cleaning the dishes, media is right there beside you. Prior to taking COM 250, I would definitely consider myself as a passive consumer who never truly questioned what media was purporting to me. However, now that we’re nearing the end of this course, I’d like to share with you some of the eye-opening concepts that I learned, changing how I perceive media.
10. Quality reflects popularity
I was always baffled about how society put specific shows or songs on these shiny pedestals despite other seemingly decent content was shunned by society. Subsequently, I was floored to see that quality is partially correlated with social influence!
The content with the greatest number of likes, streams, or other quantitative data generally becomes the more popular than its competitors thus making it seem objectively better.
9. We like media we’re already familiar with
Through studying people’s preferences to different types of media, a spotlight shined on the mere-exposure effect for me. This phenomenon states “people tend to be initially hostile to or suspicious of new experiences, then gradually come to accept and even like anything that has become familiar” (Hobbes, 2021). As a result, when we are younger and our parents play their favorite music, we eventually become accustomed to that style of music and start preferring it from other genres due to our prior exposure to it.
Seeing that we like media we have grown accustomed to, it made me realize that most popular forms of media have this specific structure to them that play to our familiarities making them, well, popular!
8. We love authenticity and authority
Authenticity, the ability to be unfiltered and true to oneself, and authority, being distinguished, are a dynamic duo when it comes to personalities. People who are authentic are more alluring and intriguing and those who have authority are generally highly regarded to by their peers. Thus, when you combine these two characteristics, you get an individual who is essentially loved by the world. For instance, I noticed that all of my role-models are authentic authoritative people, such as Britney Spears or MARINA, who are also incredibly renowned influencers!
7. Stereotypes dangerous
Growing up stereotypes have been drilled into my head regarding bullying, but COM 250 offered a different interpretation as to how harmful stereotypes can be.
Although most media may use stereotypes to help exploit a narrative without having to take the time to elaborate upon it, these tropes may negatively impact individuals: Depicting women as passive and overly sexualizing them may cause girls to believe that all women behave and express themselves as so on a daily basis even though women can have many more facets than being a man’s prize!
6. Media can transport us into a different reality taking us away from the real world
As an art lover, this wasn’t a new concept to me either, but I didn’t know just how strong immersion is used to draw people into the whimsical world of media versus reality. Immersion is when an individual becomes so engaged with a form of media that they lose any sense of physical awareness and feel as if they are a part of the medium’s story (Hobbes, 2021).
When media causes immersion to occur, this can result in binging pulling people from reality for consecutive hours. Although, it might be a nice little break, binging in media consecutively can cause us to lose touch with the real world in my opinion, as we start dropping opportunities to hang out with friends and family, see nature, and so on so forth.
5. Social media platforms use us to make money
Most social media apps rely on a type of advertising where a company pays for an ad to be placed on an app in hopes for us to buy their product. Due to the popularity of social media, more and more franchises are paying social media platforms to place ads on their sites to entice us, making us the ultimate product and consumer for social media; without us, these ads would be irrelevant and would not generate any money for social media companies.
4. Algorithms are everywhere
Period.
In all honesty, I’ve associated algorithms with search engines such as Google, but never knew that social media platforms like Facebook and even Netflix use algorithms to personalize the content that a user views.
Discovering that companies are able to track what your online identity kind of freaked me out a bit and made me want to go on a media fast forever!
3. Reading laterally is a must
For starters, reading laterally is actually leaving a source you are reading to ensure that their content is credible.
I ranked this as third on my list, since I was never aware of the concept and reading laterally may minimize the plague of misinformation that we’re currently enduring.
2. There are always deeper meanings to media
One major important detail I learned was how media is a multifaceted world that portrays more than just one message. A meme might seem playful on the outside but pertain propaganda underneath it. Similarly, an advertisement might appear bright and colorful but is actually using techniques that appeal to us to make us want to buy that product
Media unknowingly can be very deceptive in this way, which is why I placed it as 2nd on my listicle.
1. Section 230 is a scapegoat for suing social media platforms
Do I even have to explain how this my number one? Section 230, which is a part of the Communications Decency Act explicitly protects platforms from being sued for fraudulent or defamatory content (Hobbes, 2021).
This legislation basically makes social media platforms untouchable for everything, which is terrifying to me! For example, an individual on Grindr had an ex who was actively advertising fantasy-rape hook-ups at their ex’s workplace, home, and other areas without the ex’s consent, causing harassment, humiliation, and trauma to the ex. As a result, the ex attempted to sue both Grindr and the revenge-performing individual: The individual dispute was settled but Section 230 allowed the app to evade any persecution! Similarly, if someone starts posting libelous material about you, the platform cannot be sued for not taking it down, it now becomes a matter of charging the individual who posted it which many see as an interference of freedom of speech.
To me this information literally flipped my outlook on social media, as I now see them as untouchable tyrants instead of passive places for communication, entertainment, and self-expression. __________________________________________________________________
Hopefully if you’ve gotten this far that you gain a sense as to how life-changing becoming media literate is. Ultimately, there are more than just 10 topics that I will take away from this class, but these ones were the biggest groundbreakers to me.
References:
Hobbes, R. (2021). Media Literacy In Action: Questioning the Media. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
