Techonology

Technological change greatly influenced the radio industry in the 1920’s by making music and news easily available to a much broader audience.

The radio was first made for government and big business use. The earliest uses of radio waves were to transmit Morse code. Not until David Sarnoff came along did anyone think to make radios for commercial use. Once radios were developed for household use, many people were able to bring into the home a new piece of technology that would be able to inform as well as entertain at an instant.

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The home radio dramatically changed how people got news and entertainment. People at home were able to flip a switch and hear current news from across the nation, popular music and entertainment news. The radio quickly changed the American household and created national celebrities. Radio listeners came to know the radio stars through their shows. The radio enabled an audience to be exposed to people and lifestyles very different than their own. Americans were exposed to many products that they may have never known of through the radio advertisements. Advertisers saw a way into American households and took full advantage. Americans were so excited about the new technology that they didn’t seem to mind the ads.

The transformation radio underwent in the 1920’s dramatically changed the way society worked. The family much of the time sat around together listening to their favorite shows. This new technology kept changing and is still a major market today. We continue to see the impact of radio in today’s life. 

Cultivating a False Reality

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Men and women play different roles in today’s society. The perception of these typical gender roles is the outcome of many years of seeing in the media how women and men are supposed to act. The cultivation theory explains perfectly how society today perceives men and women’s roles.

The cultivation theory states that over time, seeing how the media represents reality, the audience creates a new reality for themselves. The media does not depict reality, but it can be easy to fall subject to this unrealistic society portrayed in the media. In this reality, men are the ones in charge, strong and brave; women live to be pretty and to find a man to serve.

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In Killing Us Softly 3, Jean Kilbourne exposes the so-called reality depicted by advertisers. Women in the media are never fat, always gorgeous and inferior to men. Is this the ideal woman that every man intends to find? The reality is that this woman does not exist, but the media has successfully shown her countless times and skewed society’s view of an actual woman. In Tough Guise, Jackson Katz lays out the changes men’s images have undergone over the years in the media. From movies to toys, men are depicted as macho tough guys. Over time, men are being depicted as more aggressive, violent and strong. This translates to how men think they need to be perceived and their reality is skewed. The media hardly ever depicts a real man or woman and in the real world people often times are walking around trying to be how they think they should be in relation to media representations.

If society were not overly exposed to these ideas in the media, would these ideas still exist? Whether this be reality or not, it is not likely that the media will stop using skinny women and overly bulked up men in movies or advertising. It is up to the audience to create their own reality not based on these influences. 

The Misrepresented Truth

The media has successfully gained control of society through its use of gate keeping. The media morphs and distorts the truth in order to keep the public blissfully unaware of the facts. Not many realize that they are clay in the potter’s hands. The concept of hegemony describes perfectly the media driven society we live in today.

Hegemony can be described as the way that a dominant group influences another group in order to control it. The average person combats the media daily as each different news station, magazine and paper tries to report the truth. The dominance of media is evident in today’s society and it is easy to let it take charge. Those in charge of what is reported and what is unimportant control what the public sees as the truth. With so many different places to gain information, the “truth” can be reported in many different ways. A credible source is hard to come by because bias is almost unavoidable. The gate keepers of what is reported can let through what they think is the truth and keep back what they do not approve of.

In reality television, we have all come to discover there is little to no reality present. Show editors control and manipulate what really happens in order to change the audience’s perception. For example, an editor can take footage from two different points in time completely and put them together to create a scene that never really happened, but looks quite good together. In the link below, it is shown how easily a situation can be manipulated in order to change what the end perception will be by the viewer. 

Editing Tricks 

There is no avoiding the media and it is up to the intelligent member of society to interpret and discover the truth.