How significant do you think the impact of the mass media is on your worldview?
When I was younger I would watch shows like Sailor Moon and I'd feel inadequate, even at only eight years old, realizing that I didn't look like those girls. The more I matured, the more I realized that the women on television and in movies were nothing like me. No one wants to watch a television series about a chubby fourteen year old girl who goes to a crumby high school in an even crumbier town. Nobody wanted to read a book detailing the life of someone who pretty much did what everyone else did to get by. I wasn't beautiful, I wasn't special, and do you know how I knew that for sure? Because the media was always quite apt to make it known.
Body image and the way I portrayed myself was hugely impacted by the media, all throughout highschool and even now, when I so readily will tell you that I do think I'm a stellar individual who has the ability to get past what the media says. I love to think that I'm a strong, independent woman who can form her own thoughts and opinions, free from media-related influence, but that'd be a lie. I still get down from time to time knowing that I'm too tall to be a runway model, too thick to wear the cute dress that Zooey Deschannel wore on the cover of Cosmo a few weeks back, and that my skin is too pallid to even bother trying to put cover-up on every day. That's all just under the one category, too. We've only scratched the surface on how the media has skewed my worldview.
My self-esteem and my body image are my direct worldview in the sense that they affect me the second I wake up and step in front of a mirror. But there's so much more to my worldview than that. The media has helped me be afraid for the future, it's helped me hate people (hordes of people) for reasons that I couldn't even rightfully explain to you now. I grew up at just the right time (sarcastically speaking) to learn why everyone but us is bad. I was in the fourth grade when those terrorists hijacked those planes and crashed into the World Trade Center. Grade four. I was nine years old when I first learned just how scary and ugly the world really was. Nine years old when I learned how to hate a whole group of people (wrongfully so). Nine years old when I started letting the media speak for me.
It has taken me until now, just about, to really separate myself from the media. I sound like a conspiracist or a crackpot when I say this, but really think about it, for so long we've let the media speak for us. I have my own opinions, I'm sure in some ways they're still skewed, but at least I know enough now to really look into things and not just take what the Global News anchors tell me without question. I read up on things, I look at different angles, both sides of the story, everything that I can do to free myself of that one-sided, fearful, hateful mind frame I'd been living in for so long.
TL;DR: The world is weird and everyone is all messed up sometimes :/ myself included.
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