We The Media

We the Media has given me even more examples of corporations hunger for the publics consent of their ‘wanted’ products. When people’s minds are manipulated as much as they are, it has become easy for corporations to sell what they want to sell. The only things on their minds are profits, so they will say and do anything to get your attention.
What has struck me in this book is the effects that TV has on children and the youth of today’s world. “The greatest amount of television viewing takes place among children and young adolescents and peaks around age 12. By age 18, the average child will have watched 22,000 hours of TV- more time in front of the tube than in the classroom.” (We the Media 64) Today, young people generate $150 billion through their materialistic lives. Selling stuff to these kids is a big chunk of their profits so lots of advertising involves young people or is pointed towards them in some way. Why these kids are making companies such large profits has to do with kids not questioning what is surrounding them, they just buy what they want. Since they are exposed to TV, Internet and advertising everywhere you go it creates a person who doesn’t think twice about what he or she is buying, as long as this product will do what the advertisement says. And as long as everyone else at school has one, you may as well get one too, just to fit in.
Our youth needs to be educated about these things. I’m positive this type of culture will have bad effects on us overall. When the youth becomes more and more exposed to things they supposedly need they will stop questioning and just do what it says. I can already see the effects in my friends who watch a lot of TV. They watch TV all day long and the only subject of conversation surrounds things they’ve seen on TV. Any other topic brought up will die down quickly because they have no knowledge of it. Soon enough we’ll have a society that is controlled by advertising, and we can already see this today. If some small business is making a product but doesn’t have the money to advertise as much as a large company, they’re product won’t gain much more momentum. A big company, however, can start a quick advertising campaign and have their product on grocery stores shelves very quickly. And although these two business’s products are the same, brand parity, the one that is seen by the public will be the one to sell.
Its scary to see what this kind of control will do. What if there is a civil war? Whoever controls the flow of information will most likely be the victor. And the people who now control the flow of information are people who would fend for themselves in a war-like situation, and not have a care in the world for the people that made them rich. They have the power and the means to do what they want, that is a scary thought to me.

Hazen, Don, Winokur, Julie. We The Media. New York: The New Press; 1997.