Why media needs to exercise some self discipline to get rid of its insecurity.

Why media needs to exercise some self discipline to get rid of its insecurity.

“The information we consume matters just as much as the food we put in our body. It affects our thinking, our behavior, how we understand our place in the world. And how we understand others.” ~Evan Williams

I would further add:- how we interact, interpret, react and believe too.

The purpose of this write up is to drive home the point that modern media in the name of unbridled freedom,

unfortunately, gives out selectively more negative news - there are some probable explanations for this which I shall briefly explain while concluding.

Documented information by virtue of easy accessibility has greater impact among the major means of knowledge acquisition.

There are three ways of acquiring and assimilating knowledge:-         

1,Pratyaksha pramana=Direct experience

2,Anumana=inference or logic

3.Shabda pramana=Verbal testimony or verbal account or verbalizing a fact or imagination or lie or concept or idea or thought or opinion and so on .

Major portion of the knowledge of majority of us are inevitably through Shabda pramana [Verbal testimony].

Most of our belief systems , frames of references to grasp and understand are, therefore, based on Shabda pramana [Verbal testimony] starting from belief in heaven and hell.

It is inevitably so , as everyone cannot have experience of performing a brain surgery or everyone cannot visit moon.

So, we must believe in the versions of those who have done them with ample empirical proof and other evidences and probability of existence of such things or events or personalities etc.

This has its own inherent importance as Isaac Newton has said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”-

Therefore, it would be better in the interest of all life on this planet that those who have the privilege of being in the media feed in positive news and report negative and nauseating facts too with lesser visibility.

Media is born with a sense of insecurity and suffers from  survival dilemma which causes all negativity.

Modern media nudged its way through very a very fast evolutionary growth in many domains pushing to the background even many myths and religious edicts , and more so, it had to wade through dominant human mind influencing and thought provoking classical literature, great philosophical concepts and ideas, emerging immense advancements in science, innumerable intellectual analyses  and the churning in social systems migrating from empires and dictators to democracies, economic studies going beyond mere marine trade, intellect surging with rationalizing free from many restrictive religious doctrines etc.

In this competitive milieu where most of the activities enumerated above where vying with one another to occupy the mind space of human beings, media made its humble roots as a mere tool for imparting information and reporting facts and developments.

Besides all these, politics, politicians and certain institutions started dominating the discourse, deciding what must be chosen and prioritized for and on behalf of all.

Media for its own survival started acting as a opinionated narrative generator for these types of political ideology peddling and ideology extrapolating agents as that would ensure not only its survival but may also enable it to get extra favors.

At the same time, it also tried to sound and adopt a sort of  holier than thou attitude by masquerading as a know all and judge all universal umpires appropriating some terminologies with lofty connotations like liberal, rational, intellectual freedom of expression bal bla [in the process rendering those terminologies sound banal now] while selectively targeting certain victims who lacked political power.

So, while political leaders wielded power media empowered itself by all these superficial posturing,

Now that the social media through technological advancement has transferred that crucial opinion molding factory and ideology extrapolating activity to many groups and numerous individuals the status of insecurity continues to haunt the media.

So, MEDIA as an acronym , now may be defined as:-

Mask as master of

Everything;

Desultory deception of

Involvement to inform

All about everything.

The greatest irony as well as tragedy is that media today has made a majority of the past few generations and the present generation into collective obsessive consumers of opinion templates which is an easy option over analyzing issues and incidents from multitude of perspectives incorporating various possible ways of original thinking, allowing various interpretations , providing valuable understanding with contextual relevance ,evaluations based on intrinsic attributes of any issue or individual.

Media is the only platform which can allow extrapolation of social justice while evaluating an aesthetic classical art form or evaluate sports performance with political affiliation and a host of such nonsense and romantic drivel which will put to shame the druids of the Middle age.

Marya Mannea has prescribed to media a great message long back ,  " It is not enough to show people how to live better; there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better ".

Of course, even this can be done only where the people want to become and be better.