Media We Want

Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?

This week in CPCF 1F25, the question of whether society receives the media they want or wants the media that is already given is quite similar to the paradoxical question proposed in the title. It is hard to pinpoint where the line of influence is drawn: whether what society wants is given to us through the media or whether the media tells society what they want. Which influence came first? In the text Media and Society by Michael O’Shaughnessy and Jane Stadler, the authors give arguable evidence to suggest that it is society’s culture that shapes what the media decides to publicize.

Through the evolution of Western culture, especially in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, people began to express their individuality. In this blog, the growing acceptance of homosexuality in our culture is the focus to prove that society’s influence impacts what the media will display.

O’Shaughnessy and Stadler suggest “The media reflects the realities, values, and norms of a society… the media themselves do not directly affect society; they simply act as a mirror of society” (42-43). Through the growing tolerance and acceptance in Western culture, the LGBT community began to come out of the metaphorical closet and come into a world slowly preparing itself to accept the gay community as a reality and as equals. As a result, the gay community struggled for representation to get the world to see that gay is not something that should be ashamed of or rejected. Networks and media began to see the demand for gay representation and decided it was time for gays to be seen openly in the media. Networks shortly came out with the TV series Will and Grace, destigimitazing society’s ideas of gay men. Through this, we see how society controls media as the media reflects the message LGBT wanted to send to the world and allowed a shift in ideology in Western culture.

The confusion of the whether media or society’s influence came first derives from the perspective of interpretation as described in the text. Following with the theme of homosexuality in media, a growing popular event is the Pride Parade, available to watch on news stations and live in the streets of Toronto. The authors suggest that the media “takes on an interpretative role, teaching people how to make sense of the world, of other people, and of course ourselves” (35). The media does not push homosexuality onto people through Pride but rather allows the LGBT community the freedom to express love and acceptance. The media does not implicitly make people want to be gay or be involved in the gay community, it allows them to interpret what the significance behind these events are which is exactly the influence the LGBT community wanted the media to accomplish.

The paradoxical question of the chicken or the egg is similar to the question of do we get the media we want, or want the media we get. They both seek to find what influenced the other. We see that society has a major influence on media while media has a major influence on society. However, it is society’s cultural shifts into progressive and modern thought that influence what media we are given. It is evident that the influence of society is the initial impacting factor of what we see in the media. The paradoxical question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is still unknown to me.