During this week in class, we spoke about the many effects that media has on human behavior. We forget how much power the media and news has to alter our everyday lives and decisions. The media is thrown at us everywhere we look and the news we also shove anything that they find outrageous but also exaggerate it to the point where it sounds irrelevant. The thing I find interesting is that with all this “fake news” thats out there, people still will believe every word of it because its being told by professionals and they’re supposed to be reliable.

Another topic we spoke about was human behavior and how it could be altered from certain situations. We watched a documentary called “The Big Picture: Human Behavior Experiments”. This documentary depicted experiments that were conducted in the 1990s. The first was the Milgram experiment where he studied how an individual would react to certain authority. The documentary spoke about the deaths related to this behavior. The death of Matthew Carrington was apart of a frat hazing incident where the pledges had to drink as much water as possible as there initiation test. Matthew was unfortunately a pledge and had to endure this initiation test but in doing so drowned from the large amount of water he consumed. The brothers in the frat stood and watched Matthew die because they thought he was just sleeping it off. This shows the effect media has on individuals. The media shows people are supposed to be cool and popular but people don’t understand that these characters that are on the media are false facade of how people act. The documentary also spoke about an experiment conducted by Stanford where normal people were supposed to be prison guards and prisoners. It was to show how far individuals would go without any rules or supervision. These guards increased their authority over time and started to take advantage of their fake power they had towards the prisoners. The prisoners started to react more and more to the fake power the guards were enforcing. They started to really believe they were in a prisoner and did whatever they were told.

The last thing we spoke about in class this week was the Agenda Setting Theory. It is the influence the media has on the public. I find it alarming how we rely so heavily on the media for all of our information because most of the time it is false. This power can lead to even more controversy in the world.

-Noah Soriano