Why study the media?

 Why study the media?

Media being so modern and always changing makes it a crucial aspect to study.  Studying media is to understand and analyse the process that goes into producing a text, as well as how the message reaches the audience and then how the audience responds to the text. Websites, TV and newspapers as a whole effect every single person in some way or another. 

Media studies illuminates your understanding of how things work, why people become informed - or misinformed - and how stories beliefs and myths that "control" all our lives are created and sustained. 

It is vital to know these things when looking at media because without understanding the complex links between texts, producers and audiences, and how the audience can be easily influenced by a piece of news. 

It is undeniable that we live in a media saturated society, we are now exposed to more mass media messages in one day than we were in one month just a generation ago. The centre of our lives is media. It's our main source of information about the world we live in for the majority of us. It's not even that the media tells us what to think, it's that the media tells us what to think about. 

The Charity Child Wise reported this year that three quarters of 5-16-year olds now own their own computer; half have a laptop, a fifth have a desktop PC, and a further fifth have their own tablet PC. Three in five 5-16s have their own televisions. Seven in ten 5-16s own a mobile phone, and three in five owners now go online on their mobiles. Modern society is completely dependent upon social media. 

We are all aware that advertisement is everywhere. Brands are always searching for nice, new spaces to fill with their logos. Advertising is another powerful influence on commercial media. Advertisers are able to influence what types of stories are presented. But more deeply, people's views of the world are shaped by advertisements themselves. 

It has never been simple to understand the media, and it's becoming more difficult every day. It is quite easy to contact or connect to the media, as a normal habit for every human being. Reading the newspaper while having breakfast, seeing advertisement along the highway, finding a sales catalogue in the mailbox, watching a TV program while having dinner. and we can't forget magazines, books, movie, and videos. Media is an object that no one can avoid. 

Media is important because it is powerful. Media is an important element that cannot be left out in the world. Media is always young; it alters the everyday changing world and it leads the trend. Media helps to enlarge the relationships between people. Unfortunately, media also causes us to be sneaky and false, dependent, and miss-educated. It is important to study media so that you can recognise logical lies, so that you can recognise wrong and bad use of statistics, so that you can recognise bias.