Media and Identity Contemporary Business World

Question: Discuss about the Media and Identity for Contemporary Business World. Answer: Media in the contemporary world Media in history has been locally distributed in the form of plays, locally produced books and folk lore. However, with the change in times, the change has also been introduced to the world of media. Now, it is defined by its mass reach, universal access and the speed of access. In fact, in the context of contemporary world, media is one of the major drivers of globalisation across the world. Generation and worldwide release of new works of art and media have played a significant role in bringing people from varied communities together. People from different cultures, communities, ideologies, religion are united and the solid boundaries existing between these communities are blurred away into something more abstract because of the sort of communication message spread by media. Even if the language barriers particular to individual still exist, new age technologies overcome them by dubbing the work of one language into another. Mass communication today affects everyone from a toddler to a nonagenarian by dictating their attitudes, behaviours, choices, and opinions. With the advent of internet and social media, this scope of affecting an individuals as well as masses behaviour has broadened greatly. An opinion article released by The Wall Street Journal about Donald Trump makes the rounds of the complete world within a matter of hours. Media and Me Similar to any child born in millennial generation, I was also a part of media deluge that is happening in the contemporary world. My childhood was spent watching cartoons on not only local TV channels but also from international production agencies such as Warner Brothers and Buena Vista. These made me appreciate the importance of local as well as foreign culture. Adolescence came with the setting in of mobile phone era where though I was too young and mobile phones too costly still to warrant a personal phone of mine own, I still had access to my fathers phone which became a subject of my social experiments wherein I daily attempted to call and have long discussions with my friends about how great this mobile telephony is and other such subjects of immense importance at that age. Thus my formative years were spent with what I earlier called a deluge of media. However, I did not know that the Pandoras box was just getting opened for me and things were going to get rougher still. Next came the movies and music which introduced me to a new world of entertainment and gave me access to the world of cultures and rhythms and creativity. My friends helped me get acquainted and accustomed to the western pop and hip hop. Its influence on us was so prominent that the sort of music played in western culture soon became mine and my friends definition of music. A same story was repeated in the case of movies also. We just fell in love with the concept of western movies. So much so, that at times, we used to watch more of western than indigenous movies. Another major form of media I was in touch with at this time was social media which got prevalent due to popularisation of electronic means of mass social contact such as gmail, orkut, subsequently Facebook and the most recent one Whatsapp. All of these means of communication help me connect not only to my friends but also make a presence worldwide. I felt that my identity is present on world-scape and not only in my immed iate sphere of influence. My access to other cultures and societies increased further and expanded from my local and western culture to Asian and European cultures. I could now correlate the things I was watching on TV in real time basis. Their existence solidified further. Further, now mobile phones were accessible enough that I had one of my own. And that too not the initial giant model using which I had deliberated upon the worldly matters with my friends, this time it was much more compact and efficient. It let me access a world full of information at the click of a few buttons and hence my universe expanded further (Poletti and Rak, 2014). In the background through all this were my books both academic and non-academic which were doing their slow, silent and steady work on my personality and identity. While the lessons and poems taught to me in my toddler years helped me understand and appreciate my culture, the more complex works of Shakespeare taught later introduced me to the English world once again impressing me with its all-encompassing presence in my world. The discourse on how Kennedy and Lincoln; Stalin and Hitler helped shape the contemporary world introduced me to the worlds polity and power games. Further, reading of the emergence and development of human society over the years have given me an appreciation of how individuals are the building block of every society and their thoughts and behaviours are the one that define a society. Especially the role of social leaders cannot be over emphasized. They take their communities to zenith or doom. For e.g., Perceptions of Nazi Germany across the world is based on the image people relate to its leader, Hitler. Reflections Effect of Mass media across the world is so profound that researchers often attempt to study the effect of prevalent media forms on the identity building of an individual. For e.g., to fully understand the role of media in the modern society, McLuhans (1994) interpretation of media as the message and the extension of ourselves is a worthwhile reading. It helps understanding how the different meanings and connotations attributed to media change with the change in individuals thought process and personality. Globalisation has led to creation of what is called as a bicultural identity in an individual one of which resonates with the local or the mother culture of the individual while the other one reflects the ideas and thoughts the individual generated by assimilation the different data from varied culture with which he has come in contact with during his media-lifetime (Ashiabi, 2014). In case of movies, the effect on an individual is more prominent due to the impression of the medium on two senses i.e. both audio as well as visual. This helps drive in the message more prominently. Similarly, Mobile Identity: Youth, Identity, and Mobile Communication Media by G. Stald (2008) talks about how the prevalence of mobile culture in todays world has given rise to Mobile Identity and how this mobile identity is interfering with the social real time identity of an individual. An individual associating himself too much with the mobile phone faces a change in his social functioning, relationships and personal identity. Hence, in the contemporary world, media in its plethora of forms affects an individuals identity substantially and the same is true in my case also. References Ashiabi, GS 2014, The Social-Cultural Dimension of Globalization in Kuwait: Implications for Young Kuwaiti Adults Identity Negotiation, OIDA International Journal of Sustainable Development, vol. 7, no. 05, pp. 85-94. McLuhan, M 1994, Understanding media: The extensions of man, MIT press. Poletti, A and Rak, J (eds.) 2014, Identity technologies: Constructing the self online, University of Wisconsin Press, Vancouver. Stald, G 2008, Mobile identity: Youth, identity, and mobile communication media, Youth, identity, and digital media, pp. 143.