Media Dependency In Today's World

Media Dependency in Today's World

Introduction

In these days media has become an integral part of human life. People have become so much used to of this media that it has started to influence their life. People now fulfill their needs from media which has made these individuals dependent on the media. The basis of this theory is Use of media and gratifications associated with them. People use media for many things which has given the media opportunity to exploit the interests and nature of the individuals.

Discussion

There is a theory with the name Media Dependency Theory which was proposed in 1976 by Sandra Ball-Rokeach & Melvin DeFleur. This theory is based on gratification and uses theory. This theory identifies that how the individuals have became dependent on the media. Now a day people are using media for several reasons. People use media to gain information, to entertain them and many of the people are using this media for parasocial relationship. This theory also focuses on how an individual become dependent on media in order to fulfill their needs. The more a person is dependent on media the more media will have the power to influence that particular individual which means that when a person is more dependent on this media to get information, then media have more power to influence him thorough agenda.

Media dependency is also considered to be a science. It is considered as science because we can see a co-relation between media and individual's dependency on it. There is another co-relation between the importance of media and media dependency. Every person has different use of media.

There are three media needs which shows how significant is media for a person.

The first need of surveillance. This refers to the need of information in order to understand an individual's social world.

Another need can be of action to work effectively and efficiently in the world. This can be also referred as social utility.

The third and last need that is identified by Ball and DeFleur is the escape need or the need of fantasy. In this need the person wants information in order to escape from his current world.

If these needs have individuals are high than more people will become dependent of media. This gives immense opportunity to media to influence them and affect them and their needs. It is said that these needs are not constant over the period. These need changes with the change of time. These need changes according to the use of the media. If a person previously used media just on order to get information and now he just want himself to be entertain than it will cause the shift in the need of media. This shift also influences the power of media to affect the individual's perception and life.

This theory also tells about the two conditions which heightened the need of media. The condition of need of media is when the number of media services and their functions in a particular society is ...