Impact of Media on Relationship
Introduction
The influence caused by media upon human beings is getting huger as new media appear rapidly in our society. The impact of different media on relationships have been constantly brought up. In this assay, I will focus mostly on the aspect of human relationships and on the impact of three different kinds of medium as well as two other derivatives, namely TV, mobile phone, Internet, and Facebook, smartphone, respectively, discussing the differences between media themselves as well as the differences of impact on human relationships.
Television, the medium which penetrated deeply into families, unite people at first but break them up at the end. It's an one-way medium that you can only receive information from it rather than use it to maintain relationships; Mobile phone, in contrast to television, is a medium whose function is mainly used to contact people and maintain human relationships. Internet, unlike television and mobile phone, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows distant people to keep in touch. On the other hand, people spent more and more time socialising in front of screens causing the intimacy of face-to-face communication gradually disappeared; Facebook is a small part of Internet so that it shares the same pros and cons as Internet, but it advanced the functionality of Internet and created a powerful network in human society. "According to Daniel Lerner whose classic text, The Passing of Traditional Society, argued that mass media opened closed traditional minds by revealing the vast world of difference, facilitating the 'empathy' that was a prerequisite of the mobile, politically participating, opinion-holding personality essential to modernity" (Lughod 1995: 190). It is true that the invention of mass media has made an information explosion, broadening people's perspectives and hastening the speed of acquiring information and knowledge, but what comes along with them are issues of impact of media on human's
The influence caused by media upon human beings is getting huger as new media appear rapidly in our society. The impact of different media on relationships have been constantly brought up. In this assay, I will focus mostly on the aspect of human relationships and on the impact of three different kinds of medium as well as two other derivatives, namely TV, mobile phone, Internet, and Facebook, smartphone, respectively, discussing the differences between media themselves as well as the differences of impact on human relationships.
Television, the medium which penetrated deeply into families, unite people at first but break them up at the end. It's an one-way medium that you can only receive information from it rather than use it to maintain relationships; Mobile phone, in contrast to television, is a medium whose function is mainly used to contact people and maintain human relationships. Internet, unlike television and mobile phone, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows distant people to keep in touch. On the other hand, people spent more and more time socialising in front of screens causing the intimacy of face-to-face communication gradually disappeared; Facebook is a small part of Internet so that it shares the same pros and cons as Internet, but it advanced the functionality of Internet and created a powerful network in human society. "According to Daniel Lerner whose classic text, The Passing of Traditional Society, argued that mass media opened closed traditional minds by revealing the vast world of difference, facilitating the 'empathy' that was a prerequisite of the mobile, politically participating, opinion-holding personality essential to modernity" (Lughod 1995: 190). It is true that the invention of mass media has made an information explosion, broadening people's perspectives and hastening the speed of acquiring information and knowledge, but what comes along with them are issues of impact of media on human's