Drugs and mass media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Drugs and mass media - Essay Example In the book â€Å"One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of Advanced Industrial Society† Herbert Marcuse claims that in modern society people are determined by the information that comes from mass media and technologies (13). The information forms the concepts people keep in their minds to estimate things they meet in their lives. The point is that people almost become controlled by the images and concepts mass media thrust them. For example, concerning drugs, when we watch some advertisement on TV where we see that people who have used some medical drugs become healthy and happy, we undoubtedly believe that we will get the same effect if we start using the drugs as well. The main problem is that we certainly believe in what we see in mass media because media system taught us that the best way to get trustworthy information is looking for it in mass media sources. Why don’t we ask ourselves whether the conceptualizations we get from media are truthful or just the tools of manipulation on society? Within his social theory of communication famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann argues that communication is the main basis that lies in fundamentals of society. As far as mass media is the main communicative tool of modern social system, it works throughout all the aspects of society (25). First of all, it forms public opinion, which evidently is one of the most powerful manipulative remedy against personality. It turns out that considering media products, for example, watching TV we unconsciously catch the main points of public opinion. In other words, we learn how we have to look like and who we have to be to become the persons accepted by our society. If watching TV we see that it is normally to use drugs to look cool and stylish, we start using drugs to become cool and stylish. Luhmann claims that the messages we