After a long 6 or 7 tedious weeks of blogging about media, I must now think to myself what did I learn? Well besides learning my best friends sleeping pattern revolves around lectures I have surprisingly learnt a lot.
It was not apparent to me before this course how interesting media actually is and what goes on behind the scenes.
It’s amazing how influential ANY person’s opinion can be on ANYONE! Media is such a monumental part of our lives that it has an effect on people, and rightly so. It was also was identified that some media has more effect on people than others, for example a superhero movie may not influence kids as much as adults as generally the majority of adults can understand the difference of fiction and nonfiction better then children.
Another interesting discussion was about controversial advertisements and this presented to us advertisements which included the use of drugs, sex, Hitler and many more taboo public subjects.
But then, surely, we had to question who was allowing this media to go out in to the realm of the mediated public sphere… for EVERYONE to see. It’s the likes of Fairfax and Newscorp which have mass control over media. Does this bother YOU?
Who controls the media does not bother me one bit, however if the owner uses media to strongly persuade people to believe certain things such as who is wrong or right at war or presents one sided views, this is wrong!
Possibly the greatest part of the mediated public sphere is that it in fact allows people to comment on bias news reports and have their say on what happened and allow for other people to back them up… unless of course you live in North Korea. North Korea, to put it politely, is not mates with the mediated public sphere and they have full control over what their citizens see. A funny yet shocking example of North Koreas overpowering media control took place at the 2014 South African World cup. In North Korea the news presenters lied to fans stating that they had won games that in actual fact they didn’t win.
The BCM110 course has been extremely interesting this far and I am looking forward to learning more… and blogging more
Peace! Bless!
The Good, the Bad and the Published 