How do the media influence your beliefs?-13021283

Nowadays, with the development of the science and technology, we are groping our way in a new era. Various kinds of 3D products were showed out and the media also use the 3D products to spread the messages. All of the 3D products are the “massive advertisers”. Because people can’t live without 3D products now, the advertisements are ubiquitous and we’ve all been affected. The media not only use the advertisements to spread their messages, but also their beliefs.

As I mentioned that the media use the advertisements to spread their beliefs, and why they use advertisements? Advertising is a form of marketing communication used to promote or sell something, usually a business’s product or service or spread messages. Advertising by a government in favor of its own policies is often called propaganda. We can see that advertisements are so strong in our daily life. We can meet them everywhere. Increasingly, media are overtaking many of the “traditional” media such as television, radio and newspaper because of a shift toward the usage of the Internet for news and music as well as devices like digital video recorders. With the Internet came many new advertising opportunities. Popup, Flash, banner, and email advertisements (all of which are often unwanted or spam in the case of email) are now commonplace. And all these kind of media can link to one thing-spread medium. They spread their massages and beliefs by advertising. The TV shows we watch always have commercial breaks, the radio we listen always have spot announcements. The media now are using the advertisements to affect our lives. What’s more, these affect more than our lives, it’s our beliefs. How can I say the media’s advertisement have too much influence? Take American government as an example, Advertisements in schools is a controversial issue that is debated in the United States. Naming rights of sports stadiums and fields, sponsorship of sports teams, placement of signage, vending machine product selection and placement, and free products that children can take home are all prominent forms of advertisements in schools. American government tries to stop these. Media use the smartest way to change our beliefs imperceptibly, because we are in a world full of advertising.

Actually, media can use advertisements influence many part of our lives. Now we talk about how the media influence our beliefs. When the media want to spread a belief, like “Buddhism”, the media will be spread the advantages of Buddhism in the TV and show more information to all watchers. Moreover, the media may set up a TV special topic to spread this belief. When people watch TV, people who never know Buddhism will have a deep understand in Buddhism. Because more people have a wrong understand in advertising, they think TV always spread the right things. Some people will be addicted in Buddhism because of the advertisements they watch. Otherwise, people always think TV show us the new trend so that sometimes they just follow the trend, go with the stream. Another example I want to put up with is that the public service advertising. We can see that we are all drawn into the public service advertising when media put that in. The non-smoke advertisement always gets people thinking easily. Some might be stop smoking because of it. The attitudinal or behavioral outcomes of media use can be expected to influence selection of and attention to media content. This process can be conceptualized in terms of mutually reinforcing spirals akin to positive feedback loops in general systems theory. This reinforcing spirals perspective highlights the need for longitudinal modeling of mutually influencing media selection and effects processes; study of the impact of such processes in youth and adolescent identity development; and analysis of social and psychological factors that control, dampen, or eventually extinguish the influence of such spirals. This perspective may also, more speculatively, be extended to address the maintenance of social identity for political, religious, and lifestyle groups. The relevance of a reinforcing spirals model to theories including spiral of silence, agenda-setting, framing, cultivation, selective attention, and uses and gratifications is also discussed.

When it comes to here, the media surely did influence our beliefs. There are moral and immoral. On one hand, it has advantages that we can seek out guidance to steer you in the right direction by watch the beneficial information. On the other hand, it has shortcoming that more and more commercial advertising doesn’t consider the beneficial things, the media always send the bad beliefs in order to make more money, so media not always influence our beliefs in good ways. In order to avoid these, media should avoid spreading the bad beliefs to the public. At the same time, the government should take care of these.

As far as I am concerned, media influence our beliefs by advertising. Because advertising are everywhere, the media spread their beliefs widely. In view of the disadvantages, we should not change ourselves torpidly in order to catch the trend which the media spread to us.