MEDIA AND CULTURE

Media and Culture



Part 2: Media and Culture

Each community has values, prejudices, standards, concerns, symbols, fears, pride and concepts of its own. These codes are shared by all the societies and make them different from those of others. The media are, in turn, a part of the society they serve and interpreters of the concerns of its members. This paper will discuss upon the effects of media on the culture and the extent of its ability to reflect the cultural values, norms and traditions of the society.

Media and Culture

A glimpse on the coverage of media to the topic allows us to study the political values of a society, its punishments and rewards, the reactions of its people to certain situations, attitudes common to its members, the expectations placed on public officials or elected representatives. It is not necessary from an apocalyptic vision to assess the effects of mass media on contemporary culture, but enough to be realistic. The media effects, more than ever, in educating new generations, shapes public tastes and trends of all ages, builds the agenda of the topics we discus every day, and have even changed the ways of living and leading. What once might be a partial truth today is the tone of a plain truth: the mass media have become more influential in our cultural training how to relate to the world and our fellow men, in the comings and goings of everyday work and creation, and even in the intimacy of home life. Today, it is inconceivable to us a world without television, Internet, cable TV, radio, print and film, while a century ago, except the devoted readership of newspapers and books, our ancestors could live better regardless of the media. The press, indeed, enjoyed a growing audience, but it was conceivable that the great majority live outside influence. Among them, perhaps the most notable is pointing to the concentration of media power operating at transmitting universal homogeneous values and behavior patterns that transcend borders, fueling a transnational public increasingly uniform as warns, threatens to erase cultural identities through poor general messages.

At the same time, it deepens the digital divide and, hence, the cultural divide, as part of the enlargement process of communication asymmetries that increasingly alienate the rich and poor countries. Within the asymmetries, highlights the hegemonic position of the United States, particularly with regard to Latin America, which continues its romance with Hollywood on Fox or HBO, exposes youth subcultures MTV and such, and lags in connectivity about interactive media. The illusion of electronic media, with its ease of adoption, and the magic of the small computer screen or TV set, generates a communication distance of other experiences that require different forms of attention and thinking skills that can be relegated for the sake of the immediacy of new media. However, along with these possibilities, new instruments for young people away from other training procedures have been introduced for the serenity of ...