The Power of Mass Media and Our Role as Responsible Information Consumers

When we are innocently forwarding images and sharing short videos or excerpts, it is important to think about the messages that the image holds. Especially when accompanied with a version of the truth, images are communicating a silent message.

Vertov, a cinema theorist and the director of Man with a movie camera , would argue that the audience will only see what the directors want to show, giving them the power to reflect or manipulate the truth. So, it is important to know who is behind this image and what they intend to say.

This means that media can play a positive and a negative role, depending on its consumers.

Media can be politically bias and can feed political polarity by playing its role as an ideological state apparatus, what Althusser defined as social institutions that recreate societies who do not question the system (read more about ISAs: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm) . It can brainwash people into reproducing the status quo.

Yet, mass media also has a the revolutionary power to make a social change and make people aware of their conditions, just as it fueled a revolution in Lebanon (read more about the Revolutionary Power of Mass Media in a Lebanese Context https://salwazaatari1.wixsite.com/thoughts-that-matter/post/the-revolutionary-power-of-mass-media).

Social media can influence people to make a positive change or turn them into subjects of interpellation, as Althusser would say. Utopians were right to have hope and faith in the power of the image and in media. It just requires users to be aware of what they are watching or sharing.