Media Shapes Us

Over the last few days I've been thinking about how media shapes the way we think about things. We watch a news broadcast and we form our opoinions on what is going on around the world. We see a moive about a group of people that we have never heard of and assume that what we saw is how it is. Think about it, we are constaly taking things in but we never stop to think about how it is effecting us. During the "Merchants of Cool", it talked about the feedback loop. But this doesn't only apply to teens. Look at the young adult age. We've been shaped by what we watched when we were younger and now as we beging to change in what types of media we take in we begin to change again. It might be reading a book or a news story, but everything we see tells us what to think about something. In one of my other classes we watched to movie "Whale Rider". This was a moive about the Maori people from New Zeland. I new nothing about this tribe before I watched the moive and then from the movie I took what I saw as really. We had to research the tribe and I found that a lot of what we saw was untrue. The didn't tell parts of the story right and even left parts out. When we had the class debate about if this was right or now it made me think. Did I have a wrong view of something else because I only know part of what is true? How many times have I judge a semotic domain based on what I've read about it? Too many times. If we all take a step back and think about what we are taking in, then see if it is true or not the world would be better off.