Media Problems essay
The relevance of mass media hardly can be overvalued today. However, being sure with its necessity and importance, people often are far from the nature of media’s impact to our lives. It is stated that TV, movies and computer games influence our culture forming directly.
To begin with, let’s get clear what is the culture in fact. In this order, culture can be defined as complex collection of knowledge, folklore, language, rules, habits, lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs, rituals, and customs. This complex combination identities particular group of people at a specific point in time(Peterson, 2008). Being clear whit the term’s definition, there is one more reasonable question – what generates and determines it? Communication is the only convincing explanation. In fact, communication appears as the most significant tool for interactions between people establishment. As culture forming is shared process, it is the best source for group norms creating and spreading. Talking about the most improved ways of communication, media worth to be called those.The main value of it is gathered around the meaning of capacity, which is useful to store and distribute messages of products’ creators. Being shared and accepted by community, these messages are used to become the part of culture. In this way, relations between mass media (movies, TV, Internet, computers games etc.) and culture, are closely grounded on media’s function of communication providing. Frankly, by taking the function of “mail-man”, messages contained in mass media becomes essential part of our culture. Therefore, culture is directly reflected in movies, TV and other media sources.
So, we are persuaded that mass media has the ability of our culture influencing and forming. Thus, let’s take special look at the media’s field of electronic games, the impact of which is widely disputable recently. Being honest,it is quite hard to emphasize the list of the most influential electronic games. Here is the approximate, founded on one of the web resources: Grand theft auto, Portal, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Half-Life 2, Silent Hill 2, Metroid Prime, World of Warcraft, Sims(Kohler, 2010). Seemingly, the level of impact is determined by games popularity. On the other hand, popularity is the first premise for cultural norms establishment. Now, let’s take the look at list of noted influential electronic games. Featured with different concepts and genres, all of them are directly devoted to violation (except Sims). Consequently,violation is promoted to become the part of modern culture. This is the main controversial issue about modern computer games. Moreover, the full harm of gaming boom impact is not felt yet. Regarding this fact, theyoung age of most players has to be considered. The phenomenon of gaming is known for several years only. Therefore, cultural values promoted by appropriate products go back-to-back with more humane values of previous generation. In this order, lets’ imagine the time when traditional foundations will be gone fully due to extinction of their carriers. Presumably, significant transformation of culture will be inevitable result, and this transformation unlikely to be positive.
To conclude, people often miss impact they accustomed to be influenced through media sources. With certain info accept, we do not care about its meaning often. This practice has to be braked down at the nearest future, as negative consequences won’t be avoided. Therefore, humankind feel need in rethinking of attitude to media and messages contained there.
