Some people think that Internet has drawn people nearer, while other think that it has isolated people from each other. The five-day without mass media gave me much enlightenment on this topic. Specifically, it contained two vital points: What did mass media brought to us, how we rely on it and how it changed our life; were all these changes good?
3.1 Live in Mass Media It is obviously that the mass media plays an important role in my daily life, from morning till night, from personal to interpersonal. That is the five-day mass media deprivation alerts me how depth that I rely on the social applications. From the very beginning of life without mass media, I often felt anxious and boring because of cannot connect to friends on the social network, I always repeated checking the phone if there is any notifications.
To be more specific, actually, through the five-day without mass media I realized that a majority of my past mass communication with my friends or net friends on the internet were useless social interaction. That is to say, I can live without all these mass media for days and my daily life can still runs normally only to some extent it brought me anxious and uncomfortable emotion at the very beginning. The five days make me realized that the relationship between my friends and I is not that intimate as I considered. In addition, there was good news that I used to feel my shoulder and neck hurt while they turned to be eased after living without social applications. This is completely unexpected surprise.
3.2 Are All These Changes Good? As for me, lived for five-day without mass media, the result made me be conscious of that the impact of mass media were not always positive. This makes me feel uncomfortable. Accompanied by its advantages, meanwhile, the mass media really do harm to our daily life and interpersonal relationships.
Undeniably, mass media bound for our time and freedom. Recently, People often hear about some stories which sound like jokes. For instance, a group of friends go to a restaurant for dinner, they have to put away all their Smartphone together in case of someone cannot help to play with the phone so that disrupt the meeting. If someone uses the phone, he or she has to treat all the friends. This kind of situation often happens in our daily. A bunch of friends made a special party while during the party almost everyone was playing the Smartphone to talk with others or just browse the websites aimless.
4. Implications and suggestions As discussed above, except for its positive role, excessive use of mass media has brought some negative influence to our life (Ahonen, 2017). What is more, to the whole society, the mass media has great effect on the culture, ethics and education. Proceeding from this point, implications and suggestions can be concluded from the five-day without mass media.
Primarily, spend less time on virtual network, that is to say, cut down your time that spend on you Smartphone or TV from maybe 5-6 hours to 2-3 hours. Pay more attention to family and friends and distribute the time to accompany the people we love. To be more specific, avoid too much useless social activity. Stop consuming hours on Smartphone which makes you still feel lonely and boring. Spend appropriate time with family member to watch TV together or go to some meaningful outdoor activities. These can not only release people from the intensive interaction with other people online, but can also promote family harmony.
Secondly, make use of the time originally used to surf the internet or watch TV to learn a kind of musical instrument or practical skills. This will be an effective process to distract your attention on mass media and really enrich yourself in practical talent.
Afterwards, in terms of culture and education, people should keep children and adolescent far away from the excessive exposure of mass media. As a result of excessive exposure, children and adolescent may face up with lots of problems (Vivian, Maurin, 2017). For instance, if they are exposed too frequently there may be security issue. Besides, mass media often spread too much thriller, violence and pornographic information. These may mislead kids and teenagers.
Last but not least, introspect yourself whether there is a need to spend a lot of time in virtual network world and the TV (Castells, 2017). From the perspective of individual, only understand the fundamental factors can people utilize the mass media correctly. Before reducing the use of mass media people should have sufficient psychological preparation.
5.Conclusion |
