Places and forms of power : are media a rool, or a weapon?

Power

The notion I’m going to tackle is « Power ».
Power is the capacity to influence people’s behavior to reach a certain goal that a few can achieve. In fact, wieliding power gives a feeling of dominance and superiority over somthing else.
Power helps maintaining social cohesion but it also lead to many conflicts. It has been present since the dawn of time but has evolved from mostly religious, military and politiczl to new forms such as economic power, power of words or power of advertising : Power can be coercive due to its exchangeability among humans. One must wonder :

ARE MEDIA A TOOL OR WEAPON ?
In order to illustrate this notion i will first talk about the social media revolution and then give an example of this power : the advertisments.

Since the 21th century the social medias never stop growing up. With the apparition of facebook, meeting people became very easy and a lots of social medias were inspired by this idea like instagram or twitter.
In fact, more than 80% of the society use the social media for recruitments. Clearly it became a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Furthermore, this had led to the expansion of freedom of expression. At any moment we can express our feelings and the world will instantly be aware. This is the power of social media.
Obviously this phenomenon generates bigs transformations in everyday’s life : the apparation of the ebooks instead of the papaerbooks and the website instead of the newspapers. This is a world of mouth and there is two significations for that. The first one represant the mouse of the computer that became an addiction. Likewise we have  the way that people express themself on the internet.
Foer instance we can say that we no longer search for the news, the news find us via social medias. This means that everyone can be a part of the news. Moreover this revolution allowed the birth of many of international group of network activist. One of the most famous : Anonymous. They attack the government and organise bige vents via social media. This revolution made them popular all over the world.

As an example of the effects i chose the power of brands and advertising.

Brands are part of daily routine and that phenomenon is called « Brandsacpe ». Nowadays, brands pretend to sell a set of values, a philosophy and a way of life. They exert their power over consumers by convincing them to buy their product rather than another one. Moreover brand’s wealth lies in its image, its reputation, that’s why brands try to compensate their wrongdoings by giving profits to charity and by taking on good causes, hence manipulating people by humanizing corporation. Brands are also trying to create a relationship based on trust.

Furthermore brands use abusive advertising in order to persuade and manipulate people. It tells people, espacially females that beauty doesn’t exist , therefore making teenagers ashamed when they fail to look like top models. In facts, nowadays, thanks ton photoshop,  photography is being retouched in order to make models look skinner than they already are. The influence that thisbtype of advertising can have creates public health issues. In addition to this, advertising is noxious as it can lead to slippery road : it gives empty promises and keeps people dissatisfied with what they have, always wanting more. This influence of advertising  leads to an overconsuming society and a cycle of borrow.

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