Essay On The Influence Of Mass Media

There is no doubt that mass media has a tremendous amount of influence over society as a whole. Over time mass media has evolved, in the sense of new platforms to present information, quite a bit over the past century. The “start” of this was in 1923 when the Westinghouse's KDKA-Pittsburgh broadcasted the Harding-Cox election and began a constant daily broadcast. Then in 1953 electric televisions were being mass produced for commercial use. This caused TV broadcasting to gradually take the popularity away from the radio scene. If we fast forward to the 80s specifically 1982 where 80% of homes in America had a personal computer. In fact, Time named the personal computer “machine of the year” in 1982 (Rosenblatt, 1983). In 1991 we were introduced

These “filters” are called gatekeepers, all of which is a small part of the equation. In the gatekeeping theory, the gatekeeper decides what information will be released and what will not. The metaphor of a gatekeeper represents the social system put in place which decides what the public sees. Gatekeepers control the public knowledge of actual events happening but, does not let all be seen by the public eye. This term was first coined in 1947 by Kurt Lewin. He wanted to understand how a psychologist could affect social change. He did this through evaluating the modern families dinner/food process, studying the factors that went into a families dinner. Food comes to the dinner table from many different places such as the grocery store or the garden, these are channels (Lewin, 1947). The way he explains it is there are channels are divided into sections and said sections can either prevent or help the item (information, food, materials, etc.) move through the gate which sits at the end of the channel. The sections within the channel are the forces that determine whether the item passes through the gate but, it is important to remember that they can range from positive or negative and can change polarity (Shoemaker,