When we turn on a television set, we get a range of channels to keep us informed and entertained for all the 7 days of a week. When we browse the internet, an ocean of information floods at a click of a mouse. I guess we are just way to lucky to live in this era of advanced technology. These media plays a very crucial role in our day to day life in shaping our beliefs, perceptions, ideas, values and our behaviour in the society. It is a powerful medium of education and entertainment in numerous ways. But did we ever stop for a while and think what impact exactly is the media leaving on you, me, our family, on the coming generation and the society?

Our society is rampant with corruption, crime, etc. and many a times media plays the role of adding fuel to aggressive behaviour, violence, sex, obscenity etc. however more over in the younger generation.

The following two posts will deal with such issues. It is to be noted that the following posts are analysis of five research papers each post. The first post will be a brief analysis on the effects of violence in media and the second on the sexual content in media. Each post has a bibliography of the research papers followed for this project.

20 October 2012

The Media Language


David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. He argues that there is a difference between a story given to the viewer through the media language. His statement simply states that when the media gives a story out to the public it is given differently than regular narrative ones. Here differently basically means that the media uses its distinguished language of camerawork and editing to convey a story by making it more colourful and flashy than that of only the story being plain narrative.
What happens when a story is plain narrative, it becomes more or like monotonous and the audience eventually loses interest in it. Therefore in order to create or rather grab the audience’s attention media uses its unique language of introducing various camera angle like panning, tilting, zooming, etc. It’s pretty obvious that any normal human being will get bored and tired of hearing the anchor just reading its script. This used to happen years back on Doordarshan Channel where the anchor or the host just read the script provided without much of video clippings or photographs.
There, where in 90’s many exclusive 24x7 news channel came up. In order to convey its news to major audience it came up with colourful headlines, voiceovers and that is where not only the host talked for hours.
Recently the concept of breaking news came and wooed the audience. This not only lead to competition between the news channels but also lead to the entertainment plus news for the audience.  Almost all news channels follow the method of panel discussion, where a debate is held. Such panel discussion place two different viewpoints on the same subject making its audience think, reciprocate and then provoking to take a stand. 
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