Anxiety of Influence

ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

By: Rajeane S. Responde

Television – an extraordinary product of technology which plays a great role in family’s life. Remote controlled furniture feasible for venture and a shadow of cyborg existing in the present time.

The increasingly prevalent style of influential media forms constructs reconstructs and de-constructs the world we live. Media and telecommunication networks expand with unprecedented speed which results to the transformation of the conditions of life. We are in the big stage of human evolution wherein people depend so much on television and the press, we are pushed from the millennial cliff and fall off into the unconsciousness of living in the darkness. Public is engaged with the media’s tricks of using the people for business purposes.

In an interview of the newscaster Eliza Romualdez with the owner and president of ABS-CBN, Eugenio Gabriel “Gabby” Lopez III, one of the top leading stations in the Philippines, it was proven how some network used media as a market place. “We’ve pretty much a marketing-driven corporation, so we pay attention to the ratings” says Lopez. Competition is within the society of media; their aim is mainly on ratings or to be on top among the others. ABS-CBN and its rival GMA7 makes way to entertainment to have an easy grab of audience, giving people what they want instead of what they need. Networks have no intellectual security of the foundation of everything but rather securing-in-insecurity and authority, acting in the world of which priority is business, sense of relevance and values for their own good, insecurity of goals for the security of means.

 Public is persuaded by the pleasure they get from entertainment and forgot the benefits brought by news. The focus shifted from hard news to pure drama, the entertainment based television, to gain high ratings and success. Another technique of different stations is to hit sponsors through advertisement. Financial is pretty tight and commercialism is a way to fulfill these needs, to attract corporate sponsorship, telecommunication brought us to the brink of extraordinary social and cultural revolution. Television is a ground for advertisement, it seems like commercialism is a part of media’s tactics to earn, sometimes there are even more commercials than shows, networks become “ad-dictive,” very disturbing and irritating.

General public is largely unaware of what is at stake in recent technological developments. People are prisoner for unintelligible significant relationship, brilliance is stupidity without learning. Telecommunication industries misshapes the environment in the world where future generation are destined to dwell, there must be a change.

In our culture nowadays of potential catastrophe, academic neutrality paves the way for a polite silent rape. What is needed is the strength to escape from reality with the vision for the obvious. Authorship is within the environment of media, impressing the people and begging for their sympathy probably for profit. The law of the media is the law of the dirty hands, using its audience or by using the public for reason which is distasteful. Media’s trick is fooling around and yet nourishes us, opposing on money or assets as its ultimate capital.

The challenge is to create a vision that sells, a system that magnetizes, a product line that delivers a product of entertainment and builds a generation where impressions count more than intelligence. The press and the television is a privilege instrument of persuasion, the news which is given less importance is deal in rush, the debt of hard news is disregarded. Style, timing and personality has to be considered so journalists try to move quickly to be the first to get a scoop and decide without careful which reflection is to act irresponsibly.

The irony of the people is that they remain blind to the advent of the profit oriented media. A concrete policy of networks is ready made by its owners, we are in the culture of command where people are spoon-feed, take everything that is given without scrutiny, we are full and overfed with food that has no single nutritional content at all. People needed to grasp the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

 Media’s expertise is to present essentialities for securing authority. Someday news would be like water which people would need badly, thirst for it and suffer the agony in the place like desert. We have a choice and power, unity and to move as one to demand for change against the powerful cannon, to build a better future.  We must live n the reality of facts and not just live in imagination, aim for wisdom.

Society is something like a cybernetic system that is ruled by media or networks, the advertising industry. Images made by various networks are only instrumentality for their victory. Even politicians used media as medium to become popular effectively for their significance, just like news turned to movie, when a person was put into a news then used it as bridge to stardom.

We must be awaken from the nightmare and change the image through which we live, SPEAK and ACT in an effort to make difference, because an effective human conduct requires knowledge and the ability to WEIGH the forces of the media.