Media Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Media - Research Paper Example What is the extent of the reach of mass media in all of its forms? What is the impact of mass media advertising on the perceptions of people of themselves, their self-image? How does marketing affect decisions to purchase? How do mass media images and coverage influence court decisions, as typified by the effects of mass media images on high profile cases involving celebrities like OJ Simpson? What are the negative effects on the social skills of people from using social media, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of making use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter? (Katz et al., 1973, pp. 164-181; Newton, 1999, pp. 577-599; Mutz and Martin, 2001). II. Discussion There is no doubt that there are subtle as well as titanic shifts in mass media brought about by the proliferation of alternative media channels online, such as YouTube, changes in the way people consume news with the decline of print and the shift to digital, the surge of social media platforms suc h as Facebook and Twitter in terms of mind share and use on a global scale, and a host of other developments. Mass media can be construed as not being something that is static and well-defined, but rather is something that is now undergoing a radical process of change, and it can be argued that rather than being a static reality mass media in fact is in a state of constant flux (Barkow et al., 2012, pp. 121-133). The advances in communications technology facilitated by the Internet will accelerate this upheaval and change process no doubt, and the future shape and form of the dominant mass media platforms are not yet prognosticated with any degree of confidence. There are winners and losers to be sure, but who those are is anybody’s guess at the moment. With the exception of social media platforms maybe, and some established media juggernauts such as Google, it can be said that mass media as a whole, including its stakeholders and its consumers, is up for grabs and no one kno ws ultimately what its future shape and form will be (Prat and Stromberg, 2011; Crokidakis, 2013). On the one hand there are those who predict the decline in the power of mass media over the masses, and in this regard new and more potent forms of marketing are taking the place of marketing strategies that are overly focused on reaching target markets making use of mass media. On the other hand, the continued rise in revenues from advertising making use of emergent social and online media platforms, such as Facebook and the various Google search properties, attest to power not moving away from mass media per se, but moving away from the traditional mass media platforms, such as print, in favor of digital media platforms and social media platforms. What is true is that even here the landscape is not well-described, as there are differences in the ways that people make use of the new dominant social media platforms for different purposes, in different geographies and cultures (Katz et al., 1973, pp. 164-181; Newton, 1999, pp. 577-599; Mutz and Martin, 2001; Webster et al., 2005; Surani and Shroff, 2012). What is clear is that the new media platforms are indeed putting clear demarcation lines between old ways of consuming and reacting to media and the new ways that people have come to interact with media as represented by the digital and social media