Blog Post #7

3. Do you think people today use the mass media differently compared with how people used media 10 or 20 years ago.


My answer to this question would have to be no. Mass media has been used to entertain, educate, and persuade the public.

If we go back to what we discussed in the Marxism blog post, the media is used to promote some type of lifestyle and/or some type of culture. Media has helped shaped society through the years by advertisements and popular tv shows. Even though the question specifically asks about 20 years ago, you can go back as far as the 50s to see that media has always promoted a certain ideology. I Love Lucy was a show about a goofy housewife, whose life revolved around making her husband happy (as were a lot of sitcoms back in those days).

Media also knows how to be gender specific. Women are pressured to look a certain way because that is what will "attract" men. Men are pressured to act a certain way towards women because not doing so would be damaging to their masculinity.

Mass media has always been tailored to promote the interests of the big conglomerates in this world in order to make money. Media has always been driven by some ideology until some comes to "revolutionize" pop culture, only to create a new normal.

So no, people did not use mass media differently in the past because the purpose behind it is still the same. The only thing that has changed would be the new innovations of technology and the invention of streaming services and social media to help spread that ideology further.