The Media Cycle

The media impacts people by bombarding them with images and information designed specifically to shape their thinking. Mostly, the media wants people to buy their products or ideas. The media greatly affects people’s beliefs and behaviors by surrounding them with ideas, which eventually become so common to people that they become “normal”. The effect of the media and our effect on the media is a constant cycle. The media spits out images and information to the people, which is then alters the new information put into the media by the creators. However, in the discussion, there was a different theory. Since people created the media, they started the cycle by putting the first images into the media, which then changed us. Much like the chicken

The media is full of images portraying the “ideal” image of a male and female. According to the images put forth by the media, men are ideally tall, muscular, athletic, and at the interest of many women. Females are shown to be ideally thin, small in stature, big breasted, with a man who is able to fully care for her. People often compare themselves to these ideals, and it affects their self esteem. Those who do not fit the ideals of the media are likely to have a low self esteem, and they are more likely to be treated lowly by others who fit the ideals. Particularly in the area of beauty, media images and ideals set up a ranking system. For instance, many people rate others appearance on a scale from 1-10, with 1 being ugly and 10 being beautiful. Without getting to know each other, people already judge others, and rank them, without even talking to them. This judging establishes bias, which can affect how people view each other even as they get to know each

It is used to quickly transmit images and information to incredibly large groups of people. While a majority of the content the media produces is used for entertainment, it does contain underlying messages that are not solely created to entertain. For example, Thirteen Reasons Why, a tv show, was entertaining, but it also showed how people need to reach out to each other and fight the stigma of mental illness. The media can be used as a force for positive change. For example, the National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI) uses a twitter page to send posts about mental illness to a large audience. In the discussion, social media campaigns were also mentioned. By having a large amount of people post with a hashtag related to a cause, it brings more attention to the cause. One prime example of this would be the #Me Too campaign, which brought a lot of attention to the issue of sexual