Who Do You Think You Are? - Antonio Mihail
Media consumption has changed drastically in the last one hundred years. It has transitioned from the radio to the television, and from the television to the internet. Media consumption is certainly at all time high during the age of the internet and smartphones. As a millennial, I am exposed to all sorts of media through multiple smartphone applications. Social media is arguably the most popular outlet of advertisements and news currently. I use Facebook daily to not only communicate with friends and relatives, but also to receive the news of the day. I certainly am not the only person to receive my news from social media. All of the major news channels such as CNN, NBC News, Fox News, and CBS News have social media pages through which they share news, because they are aware that most people spend their free time on social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter. The president of the United States himself uses social media to convey his messages to the American public. Instead of holding press briefings, Donald Trump prefers to use Twitter to get his points across, daily.
I believe the way media is created has also changed in recent years. The type of media we are exposed to is now based on our interests. For example, marketers create their advertisements based on our personal interests and strategically place them on websites we visit the most. While we surf the web, most of us encounter advertisements that pop up at random. Those advertisements are based on our Google or Amazon search histories with the purpose to catch our attention. If I look up something on Google, such as a certain shoe I want to buy, a shoe advertisement usually appears on the bottom right corner of a different website I visit a few minutes later. Marketers will use our interests and try to expose them to us as much as possible, in effort to sell their products to us. This is the way marketing media is created and presented to viewers, nowadays.
Even though there are different kinds of media, there is one thing they all have in common: they convey messages. The messages being transmitted can either be positive or negative, depending on the beliefs and opinions of each viewer. Viewers interpret texts and images in different ways and analyze them under various criteria. Not all people react the same way to material they are being exposed to. To complicate the matter, sometimes viewers cannot even agree on the color of an image. A year ago, the internet blew up over an image of a dress that went viral on social media. Some people thought that the dress was purple and black while others were confident that it was white and gold. In the end, nobody knew what color the dress actually was. Apparently, it was explained that viewers saw different colors due to cognitive differences among them. Cultural, social, and economic aspects of viewers play a significant role in the way they perceive the messages being conveyed by media.
Link to CBS News’ Twitter Page
Picture of the Dress
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