The Media Construction of Everyday Reality

In teaching a senior level Journalism course at a teacher's university in China, I based my instruction upon a functional definition of the media from the perspective of its role in the social construction of everyday reality. I have been of the opinion, and remain of the opinion, that communications media in general, and mass news media especially, serves an important function in the horizontal transmission, integration, organization, mobilization and reform of human systems, especially in modern state-organized contexts. This function is in part super-organic and can be seen in a cybernetic manner connecting to human behavior and worldview. Media operates upon several levels in influencing and shaping both worldview and cultural and psychological patterning of human behavioral response.

The function of the media occurs at both levels in the construction of human reality, in terms of the objectification of reality, by the reporting of "factual" details and information, and the subjectification of reality, by the persuasive use of language and information to foster and reinforce subjective states, feelings and attitudes that are desired or considered appropriate to an occasion.

We may even speak of a kind of "media dependency" of people, to regularly receive updates, to keep their own internal maps adjusted to a larger map of the world, a world that is beyond their actual lived and everyday experiences. This form of dependency I think can reach what must be called neurotic states, to say the least, and may be especially inviting to people who are predisposed for one reason or another to this form of dependency. It is noticed during stressful times, for instance during the First Gulf War, when there was a national level crises, as for instance the 9/11 event, or the flooding in China in 1998, when the media played a critical role both in fostering and precipitating what can be called "hysterical" response patterns, on one hand, and on the other hand of providing a constructive channel and mode of expression for more constructive response and "rehabilitation." 

When one traverses cultures and national boundaries, the relativities of the media, and the analogies and similarities of pattern between different media, becomes more apparent. The degree to which the media is used and depended upon, by the government, and by corporations and other institutional entities, to manipulate and manage worldview as well as human behavioral response, is remarkable. Separate worldviews can be fostered and maintained indefinitely by different nations primarily by means of controlling and managing communications media in a consistent manner. Even values and worldviews can be thus manipulated, constructed and limited in deliberate ways. The media has become in fact the primary source of the transmission of information today, and is even effectively outdoing formal educational systems in the amount, quality, breadth, variety and effect of the information that is being transmitted.

One should not underestimate the importance of television and the movie industry, for instance, in the fostering and escalation of social violence, as people not only model and emulate stars as role models, but are more directly and subliminally influenced by graphic displays of repeated violence such that their threshold for the tolerance and acceptance of such violence is elevated and culturally "normalized." Social psychologists long ago recognized the strong positive correlation between media violence on one hand and the increased prevalence of actual social violence, especially among certain social groups.

But in our brief survey, we do not have to stop there. National sporting events are similar forums that have similar kinds of mass effects, as do certain anti-structural musical concerts or assemblies. Hitler was said to be a master at crowd manipulation and speech giving that resulted in the mass mesmerization of the German audience.

In modern reality, in state systems, communications media figures critically in the social construction of everyday life. If people were blocked off from the media for only a short period of time, there would soon be chaos and pandemonium as a consequence. Increasingly, we can expect that the Internet and digital information would become increasingly a central part in this process. It is beginning to have this effect as more and more people are turn to the web first and last to get the low-down on recent events in the world.

I find large forums for search, like Google, and e-marketing frameworks like E-bay and Amazon.com, but I have yet to see a site that becomes a major media player in the sense that we can ascribe to movies and to television overall.