Media Effects: Across and Between Cultures
Media has increased the connections between persons and created an environment where they can share pictures, opinions, and cultural stuff. Media is a powerful social system within the society we live in; it plays an essential crucial role in creating people’s sense of reality. Media has proved to be an influential tool on the belief were in its broader cultural sense (Bonfadelli, 2017). Media is treated as the fourth pillar of democracy across the globe. Currently, people are living in a world were media is playing an essential role in every person’s life, for it has entreated in almost every sphere of life. The influence of media in human beings’ life has grown up exponentially with the recent advancement in technology (Bonfadelli, 2017). As people in the community, they need to be aware of the values they hold in the same neighborhood, the beliefs they harbor. The decisions people make are effectively based on assumptions, education, experiences, and what they know. For over a long time, media has had its vital role to play in a cultural perspective.
According to Bonfadelli (2017), transcultural and intercultural communication can be defined with the entry based on the more extensive understanding of medial impacts, like the process of media usage, media selection, media reception meaning post communication, and construction effects of the behaviors and attitudes. The different consequences can be reinforced, stimulated, and mediated by different traditional media, the internet, and interpersonal communication. Media use has been on the rise in the last few years due to the increased technology across the globe. Through media, people in different locations on the globe have been able to exercise transcultural communication in different forms, with some being supranational communication strategies out-side the national-territorial. These concepts can easily be achieved because people can communicate from different world areas through different communications media (Bonfadelli, 2017). Media has increased the means through which people can access information, hence enabling easy transmission of culture from one nation to the other and from continent to the other. People at different locations worldwide have been able to receive global news and information through international news like CNN, BBC World, pop music, and centralized forms of music like Hollywood films (Bonfadelli, 2017). In addition to the media of news and information transmission, the Web and internet have also had their say in increasing intercultural communication cases.
Similarly, persons living in different nations have and within other nations within different cultures can effectively community are able now to be on the same level of communication and have to communicate as a result of increased use and means of media like through Skype, phone and email with people of the same culture and family members (Bonfadelli, 2017). Through these means of communication, people have been able to get knowledge from different cultures from diverse nations. They can share information through media platforms, which have increased as technology has been increasing in the last few years (Brookins, 2020). At the national level, media has played an important role in ensuring trans and inter-cultural communication and ensuring that information floors from one nation to the other are possible. Due to tom increased media usage and technology, the human community has shared information from the majority of cultures from main cultures to the other hand or people with minor cultures. Great information form the main cultures and nations have been passed from them to minor nations through media (Brookins, 2020). Media has not only mediated communications but has only updated the interpersonal communication and the impacts all these might have on the different cultural segments but also within different cultural groups.
National and international news media houses have been the leading forms of media across the globe to promote the understanding and passing of cultural diversity. Finally, to add on the examples of transcultural and inter-cultural usage through media, there is also group interpersonal communication (Brookins, 2020). Not only on a global basis where media has had significant influence in promoting cultural exchange for even on local and regional levels, but media has also had its portion in helping cultural promotion. There is also communication-based on local media and news (Showkat, 2017). Additionally, there is also the transmission of culture through local news explanation and positive issues concerning different ethnic groups and culture living in that specific community or region. At a personal level, personification interaction and interpersonal communication happen between different cultural and social groups. Most cultural communication happens between and across cultures based on direct experiences and inter-personal or even through mass media (Brookins, 2020). The effects of media in promoting intercultural communication have been significant across different nations and in different cultures, and its importance is expected to grow even further because of the increased technology over days.
Sociological Perspectives
Functionalism sees the community as a system through which all sections operate and usually work and work together in one harmony and interconnected through different forms. It is through this way that communities need to exist and be shared through different areas like media (Adams, 2019). Through this manner, organizations need culture to effectively exist and be transformed through modern forms of transmission (Adams, 2019). It is through these means that the functionalism perspective sees media a better form of ensuring culture share. The effects of media on culture can also be reviewed through the context of three sociological perspectives, including conflict theory, functionalism, and symbolic interactionism. The functionalism theory, known as structural functionalism, sees the community as a structure with different connected parts designed to affect the social and biological needs of people within the organization (Showkat, 2017). The concept has grown up in the last few years and has been applied in explaining the role media has played in promoting culture from different perspectives (Brookins, 2020). As per functionalism, there are areas where people are referred to as social institutions where the behaviors and beliefs focus on meeting the vital social needs like education, government, healthcare, economy, and religion.
Cultural conflict theory also referred to as a cultural deviance theory, has reflected and described the media’s role in promoting cultural exchange between and across cultures. The theory actively suggests that diversity between and across cultures has been increased by the improved use of media as a tool of information and data transmission (Lauronen, Heikkilä & Purhonen, 2019). The theory claims that crime and faster information transmission and values have aroused a result of sharing different cultures from social groups from other nations with different ideas that have acceptable behavior across the community and around the globe. The conflict theory currently argues that four assumptions are helpful for people to understand, including revolution, competition, war, and structural inequality. It argues that media has played an essential role in promoting across and between cultures.
The symbolic internationalism theory is another sociological perspective that has had its say on media’s role in culture (Lauronen, Heikkilä & Purhonen, 2019). Different theorist working of the interactionism perspective have argued inserted their focus on the social construction of naked reality, which is an ongoing method through where people subjectively make, create and understand the naked truth through sharing culture and reality. Theorists argue that the media has focused on constructing the continent reality in several ways.
References
Adams, S. (2019). Beyond a socio-centric concept of culture: Johann Arnason’s macro- phenomenology and critique of sociological solipsism. Thesis Eleven, 151(1), 96-116.
Bonfadelli, H. (2017). Media Effects: Across and Between Cultures. The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, 1-16. Retrieved from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118783764.wbieme0028
Brookins, J. (2020). For the Culture: A Mixed Methods Approach Understanding Hip Hop Lyricism as Sociological Theory (Doctoral dissertation, Northern Arizona University).
Lauronen, T., Heikkilä, R., & Purhonen, S. (2019). Cultural globalization on the printed page: Stability and change in the proportion of foreign cultural products in European quality newspapers, 1960–2010. Acta Sociologica, 62(2), 211-227.
Showkat, N. (2017). Media & culture: A theoretical perspective of the interrelationship. National Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, 2(1), 55- 60.