Relationship Perceptions and the Mass Media

The mass media represents us with so many different kinds of relationships with disregard to its audience, their culture, background and traditions.

When we look back at media in its starting point, we notice more of a focused perspective directed toward a specific group of people and a specific society. People rebelled against those restrictions and demanded freedom to observe, examine and become exposed to all aspects of the world, the good and the bad. This want did not just come without any responsibility, for it seems to me this desire came with a bigger responsibility and need for awareness with the fictional aspect to what we see through these mass media tools.

Television for example represents us with so many kinds of relationships and we perceive them as facts because they actually occur in a specific place and at a certain time. The danger here lies in the way that people mixed and got confused between facts and reality. If I were to examine my own culture I will say that almost all of those relationship examples that are represented to us whether they could in fact really happen or not are absolutely inappropriate. Friends for example, which is one of the most popular, TV shows create some sort of acceptance among the younger generation for friends (boys and girls) to not only live together but to also have sexual relations with each other as long as it’s based on love and respect. Our young generation might create a perception toward the true meaning of friendships that could be accepted in some other society but not in ours. In fact friends is one of the TV shows that makes people especially the younger generation dream of having such relationships or even strive to create once that are similar to that.

I don’t really believe it’s hard for many of us to talk to our best friends about relationships and I surly don’t agree that it is one of the reasons why we go to television for the answers. I accept as true that when we know that our best friend is going to, may be, tell us something that we don’t want to hear so that’s why we go to television since there are so many points of views and we use what we want as an excuse to our behaviors.

For it seems to me, there is now more awareness about this problem. However, the main difficulty lies within those who are aware of the danger and yet they let television lead their actions and they live in a world of fantasy and dreams and they can never open their eyes to the realty that is around them because it’s not as pretty as we see it.