Response (Week 2)

I found the topics we covered this week to be very interesting. Earlier this week, I posted a question regarding paradigm shifts and asked whether or not we were on the cusp of another groundbreaking shift. Our current paradigm focuses on individual effects, critical/cultural theories, and social level effects.

However, I feel that these ideas will be reevaluated as we develop into a Web 2.0 society driven by collaboration, globalization, and social networks. Now, we need to think less about how the media is affecting society and more about how society is affecting the media.

As some of my classmates have already mentioned, social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are quickly becoming go-to sources for people to find and report breaking news. Blogs are also serving as an outlet for the growing phenomenon of citizen journalism. Although major news corporations, such as CNN, also have blogs and Twitter feeds, they still have a slower reaction time compared to citizen journalists. Instead of trying to compete, these traditional news sources are slowly beginning to realize that they need to embrace these changes. They even have their own outlets, such as iReport, that allow people to report stories on their official site. This shift away from traditional news sources changes the way we think of such things as agenda-setting. It opens up a whole new set of questions as to the reliability of these new sources of news and who is influencing who. This is a key aspect of what may be a whole new paradigm in communication theory.

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My other question concerned the idea of propaganda and the techniques that are used to influence others. Even in this age of information, where consumers are more wary of marketing tricks than ever before, we still have these propaganda techniques being used effectively.

For example, the book mentions how the bandwagon technique is still heavily used to market movies and books. Before the internet, when people saw “America’s #1 Movie!” they would just have to take the commercial’s word for it. Yes, they could go and read different publications and try to find reviews but, more often than not, people were compelled to see something that everyone else was seeing. Now, we can easily Google a movie and find thousands of reviews to decide if we want to see it. Yet even if the reviews have been bad, we still have to urge to see for ourselves what people are talking about.

I think, to answer my own question, even with increasing amounts of information at our fingertips, there are still those sociological forces that drive us. We still have that unquenchable need to belong and effective advertising uses propaganda techniques to tap into those innermost desires. Whether or not we feel that this is ethical, is a whole different issue. However, it is safe to say that although we may be more aware of the fact than we have been in the past, the media still has a very powerful influence on our lives.

Tags: agenda setting, news, paradigm, propaganda, response