With technology advancing tremendously throughout the years, it has been affecting our lives positively and negatively without us even knowing. The increase of technology has given media in today’s era new opportunities and constraints to be portrayed through means of TVs, social media, and the internet. Media usage through these devices or platforms can be used for several different purposes such as advertising, entertainment, or gaining information knowledge. One form of media is social media, which have increased in popularity throughout the years with people of all ages, have a huge influence on daily users.  The role of media is crucial in influencing society and an individual’s attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions through the use of propaganda, social media, and the public pedagogy. In addition, media content that people are exposed to are often controlled by those higher in power with the sharing of user’s information thus raising the concern of our privacy.

One way that media influences the audience is through the use of propaganda and it can be bad or good depending on its context. Propaganda are primarily used to shape the audience’s opinion and was first used in World War 1. The rise of propaganda led to Edward. S Herman and Noam Chomsky coining the term “Propaganda model” which was defined as an “analytical framework” to show how systematic biases and propaganda perform with United States corporate mass media. In the book, Manufacturing Consent, it states that the model focuses on the “inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices”. (Chomsky and Herman 2) In other words, those with power and money, such as the dominant private corporations and government, are able to “filter” out whatever news they want to get the message across the public. They have complete control on what we see throughout the media based on our interest.   

Despite that the book was written in 1988 and technology aren’t as advance as today, the model still holds true to today. As a matter of fact, in Public Pedagogy and Rodent Politics, Henry Giroux explained that Disney controls “20 television stations that reach 25 percent of all U.S households” and “ownership of over 21 radio stations” (Giroux 254). He refers to this new form of media through electronic technology as “teaching machines”.  Majority of Americans spend their times in front of TVs and their technological devices which leads to public pedagogy, a form of education. This increased of media consumption shapes the audiences in how we view different identities and how we understand important ideas such as history and childhood. Henry argues that Disney portrays innocence in a way that infantilize adults which doesn’t aid them in any way because the adults are forgetting the “growing influence they have in shaping so many other facets of national and global life” (Giroux 256). Media is taking away real education where they can apply it to the real world. Not only that, dominant companies such as Disney and GE now even own a larger percent of mass media (TV, radio, newspaper). For example, Disney recently added Fox News to their impressive list of companies owned in 2017 and this shows that Disney is basically a monopoly with news outlets therefore they have a great, powerful networks of media to control the content that the audience would be receiving.

Furthermore, social media have the power to control what we see through advertising and even what information they are receiving from us. According to the article, The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook, Facebook ranks at “number two in the list of the most access websites in the world” (Fuchs 139). That being said, on a three month period from August 17 to November 17 of 2011, 43.3 percent of people in the world indicated that they had accessed Facebook, which shows how influential Facebook can be. However, that raises another question, the privacy of our information. In the article, Fuchs argues that “privacy plays a different role in a context like friendship than in an employment relationship” (Fuchs 142). Basically, sharing information to your close friends and families is different from sharing it to your hiring manager. When people choose to share their private life/information online, its exclusively only for their followers based on feeling trust and belonging together. However, those applying for a job, the company hiring can easily look up the person applying for the job up to see all their private information and they could based their employment decision off of that.

Another privacy issue regarding Facebook is the sharing of our private messages and informations to its partner. The articles states that “users or observers of Facebook exploits them by making profit with their help of their data (Fuchs 143). And this is true. The information that users give to Facebook were sold to many advertising clients at a high price without the consent of the users. From a report, Facebook share data to 150 other companie and allow some companies to read millions of private messages a month. Majority of the time users will see targeted advertisements based on their messages with their peers or what they search on the internet.

In conclusion, the increase of technology made it difficult to keep media in check due to privacy concerns and its strong presence to society and individuals’ development. Some ways to protect our individuality while maintaining the importance of media is to protect the rights of consumers and workers. Facebook and other social medias should only reveal the data the platform store about its users and users should be “protected from Facebook’s economic exploitation of their data”. Also, media should not be always be controlled by dominant corporations and governments but rather be expressed by society.

Works Cited

Chomsky, Noah and Herman, Edward. “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy

of the Mass Media.” Pantheon Books, New York, 1988. pp 1-35.Fuchs, Christian. The

Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook. Television & News Media.

Vol. 13, no. 2, 2012, pp. 139-159.   

Giroux, Henry. “Public Pedagogy and Rodent Politics: Cultural Studies and the

Challenge of Disney.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. Vol. 2, no. 1, 1999,

pp 253-266.

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