After reading the blogs of many of my classmates, it has become evident that the overall consensus and opinion shared by most classmates is that media is very beneficial and impacts all of our lives in immense ways despite the fact that many do not realize this. I believe that when we are forced to think about the ways that media impacts our lives in activities such as this assignment, it becomes relevant that media does have a very strong impact on our lives. Mass media is everywhere and helps many people everyday in many different ways. When I was brainstorming ways how media affects my life daily I thought of several eye-opening reasons. After reading the blogs of my classmates, I was faced with examples of other ways that media affects our daily lives that I hadn’t even thought of before. For example, in Nicole Hugh’s blog (http://nhough95.wordpress.com) she stated “Mental illness has impacted my life and I did not know everything I needed to know about it until it was to late.” She then explained that if she had thought about using the media to become educated about mental illness or if mental illness was more commonly explained in the media then she believes it would have been a lot less difficult to deal with a mental illness. Although there were a few blogs I read that said media had impacted their lives in a negative way rather than in a positive way, the majority of my classmate’s blogs that I read explain that they feel media has impacted their lives in a positive way. I have discovered that media does have negative factors as well as positive factors however the common opinion shared by my peers is that the positive factors outweigh the negative factors which is what I have stated in my first blog. However, there are people who feel that the negatives outweigh the positives. I believe that there is no right answer to this because everyone has different opinions and some people may receive messages from the media differently from one another. For example: in Skyla’s blog she states: “Personally I feel that the mass media has a negative impact on my view of the world. There are so many different forms of media that there is just no escaping the bad or the good, it is part of our everyday experience, when you first get up in the morning and put on the radio you get a perspective on an issue by the radio announcer…when you turn on the TV you get a different perspective on the TV announcer perspective of the issue…turn on the computer and you get different sites perspective.” Skyla’s opinion proves how the opinions vary from student to student. Although I feel differently than Skyla, I understand that the media affects people differently and I wouldn’t classify Skyla’s opinion as wrong. The fact that media is everywhere and effects everyone whether they realize it or not was reinforced by Krista Chaddock when she stated in her blog “the media is inescapable. Between television, radio, books and technology; we are literally in the company of the mass media everywhere we go” (http://kc12bq.wordpress.com). Media is a major source of education and knowledge, like I stated in my first blog, this has been reinforced by Colin Christmas when he states in his blog: “Mass media is without question a significant resource for gaining information on a range of topics around the world” (http://colinchristmas.wordpress.com).
My opinion has not been changed after reflecting upon and reading some of the blog’s of my students but rather my opinion has been made more relevant and has been strengthened. I now realize that my opinion happens to be the shared opinion of people taking this course. Although this is the more commonly shared opinion among people my age, I understand that many people feel differently due to different factors. Factors that may cause the opinions about mass media to differentiate include: time era in which one grew up, beliefs, and knowledge etcetera.
brookeharnum1 