Media Itself Is Not That Bad

The media is developing at a rapid speed. More and more platforms of media are created everyday. You just need a small smartphone and then, you can connect to the whole world. Read the online newspapers to know what is happening in America while you are in Australia, for example. Talk to your friends and relatives who are living thousands of kilometres away from you through hundreds of free apps. Make friends with people from every culture within one second. Livestream to inform people what you are doing. ...

Obviously, the role of media in our modern life is vital. People often say they cannot imagine what their life would be without internet, in other words, without assessing to the media. Research about the media audience in the past claimed that media had a direct effect on its audience and audience received the information in a passive way. But this has changed over the years. Nowadays, media audience are more active and critical about what they hear and read through the media. Therefore, I admit that media has a significant influence on people, but not to the extent that media can change and affect everything.

In this blog post, I would like to talk about how people use the media to react to modern issues and raise their voice and opinion about what they think is wrong and immoral.  In the past, when the media platforms were not as developed and popular like today, people just passively read and received information through papers, TVs, radios,...But now, the term “media” has been expanded. It is included the social websites like Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, ... and the interact between audience and the media is not one-way. People receive information from the media, then they critically think about what they hear and react to it through the media. For instance, when you read a news, you can easily share the article on your facebook and write some thoughts and comments about it.

This have both positive and negative effects.

Thanks to this, people have the right to say and share their opinion with everyone. I believe people feel more free to express their ideas in this way because it is quite hard to stand in a crowd and speak out your thought. With the media, more specificly, the social websites, it becomes much easier. On a larger scale, it is not only beneficial to a specific individual. Sometimes free-speech on social media can also be helpful to society. Take the issue of child sexual abuse in my country-Vietnam as an example. This issue has recently emerged and been repeatedly mentioned in Vietnamese media. People start to pay more attention to this serious issue than ever before. At first, one person shared their personal story about how they were the victim or witnessed a child sexual abuse case and then more people read and shared the story. Everybody even feel angry, condemn the offender and help the victim to claim justice. By this way, more child sexual abuse cases are put into light because the victims are no longer shy. They become more courageous to expose the criminal because they know everyone are ready to listen to and sympathise with their pain.