Media, Culture & Identity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Media, Culture & Identity - Essay Example piles sense of social class, ethnicity, nationality and social identity is being constructed by the visual, auditory and symbolic real(a) provided by the media (Kellner 1995, p.1). Peoples identities ar shaped by the images and information provided in the media. Hence, peoples opinion about people belonging to other countries, communities and religion is highly influenced by the images and information they jut out about those people on television and in movies. When people argon repeatedly exposed to a particular idea through visual or auditory medium, they start believing in it as a truth. Hence, influencing peoples opinion and ideas by repeatedly exposing them to visual and auditory clobber of that idea has become a favourite weapon of the media. In the age of the media culture, where peoples identities are shaped by media images, when a certain community or religion is repeatedly portrayed as a threat to the peace of the world, it not only harms the image of that community but also generates a feeling of hatred, prejudice and anger towards that community. The community that is suffering from the harmful effects of the media culture is the community of Moslem people. People belonging to Islamic religion are facing hatred and misunderstanding in the western sandwich countries because of the constant negative publicity in the Western media. It is this bias treatment of the Islamic community by the Western media that led Edward Said to develop the theory of Orientalism.Orientalism is a theory by Edward Said which proposes that the easterly countries are highly misrepresented and misunderstood in the Western countries as the Western people are constantly getting exposed to the manipulated images and fabricated news of the Oriental people through the Western media (Said n.d.) Edward Said, in his theory of orientalism, argues that the Western thinking about