Media is in our lives and is here to stay, everyday we check our phones go on social media for multiple hours, many times a day. We are glued to our phones, television and laptops we never stop and put them down. With all the social media apps it is hard to get away from media. Social media is getting bigger and more useful for everyone of all ages. In today’s society there are opportunities that arise everyday just from social media. We can get all of our news straight from our phone. Some of the news online is questionable and must be more looked into to believe it. Anyone can post anything which means people who lie have a voice as well.There are many rude and negative things that can be sent to you on social media. But because of this there are plenty of mean people in the world and being online allows them to say and post anything they want without consequences most of the time. We can block these accounts but they can just make new accounts and post the same thing. The world can be a very hateful place, especially with social media being so close to us. If we don’t fire back with more hate then that’s the best thing we can do for social media.

In May of 1962 a human experiment was conducted using the shock method. The subjects were unaware of what he was really studying. The experiment used teachers and students and led them to believe that the students would learn better when they are shocked, however, it tested how far the professors would turn the voltage. Some teachers were questioned and stopped while other, went to the highest voltage. They did that because it was they were told to do, it didn’t matter if it was ethical. The effects of media on society theories sound quite outlandish and hard to believe. The Human Behavior Experiments shine a different light on the matter. Many humans some more than others, are very susceptible to change in behavior given a strenuous situation. We also learned Agenda-setting describes the way that media attempts to influence viewers. News broadcasts use this theory to “help” viewers decide what is the most important issues in the world at that moment.

  In the documentary, The Mean World Syndrome, The man who studied at the University of Pennsylvania was George Gerbner he spent his life learning how the violence on television affects us. He found that over time, the exposure to media violence had more complicating effects. George Gerbner has said that violence has become more and more shown on television. Now a days violence has become so normalized when viewing anything on screen. This has created people to become scared and have more anger. Often there are scenes of torture or murder that has been shown in recent media. I think that sometimes we don’t need that much violence as there is.

One of the theories in which are believed to have effects on humans from forms of media is the Gerbner Theory. What I took from the Gerbner Theory is it examines long-term effects from television. the main point of the theory is that people start to have a sense of living in the fictional world of television, and begin to align their real life with it. For example, a regular everyday human that watches a significant amount of violent TV will be scared of going out into the everyday world, as if the acts they are seeing will potentially happen to them.

Question to the class: Do you believe everything you see on social media?