This week, we meanly discussed the Spiral Silence, which is a theory about when your opinion is different than most of the others, you maybe will not say your opinion out loud,  especially when media get involved. In order to win audiences’ attention, usually, the media will ignore the voice of vulnerable groups and exaggerate the voice of powerful groups. This situation makes one of the human nature pop up, human being afraid of being isolated because we are a social animal. 

Because of the Spiral Silence, the media always show unified information, when people who know nothing about what’s going on watch the news, they might not get the chance to get the complete information so they can’t judge by themselves. In China, there is an app called Weibo, it’s like the combination of Twitter and Instagram. On Weibo, some stars will hire a “water army” to help them to flood the screen with an exaggerated compliment in order to gain popularity and attention from people. Another situation is that when the paparazzi exposes scandal, the main character of the sandal might hire the ”water army” as well, they will let the “water army” control the crowd’s discussion in order to whitewash the person or shift topic. Because of the “water army” people who didn’t track the story from the beginning will be easily cheated. And if there is somebody wants to say their own opinion, the ”water army” might use really ugly language to attack them. I think that makes the Spiral Silence more serious. This situation actually already infects the media industry in China right now. The stars are all fighting for people’s attention on media, fewer people care about the quality of the film or TV shows. And the real thoughts from people can’t be conveyed because of the “water army”. This makes people afraid to speak more because they know they will be attacked.

Actually, for me, the Spiral Silence is all about courage and confidence. Do you have the courage to say your thoughts out loud and do you have the confidence that people will agree with you. And it also relates to the content of your comments. For me, I feel pretty free to talk about my feeling online, because I will control my language and only speak what I think is reasonable and I can find support for that. I will restrict my language because I still believe there’s order about the internet and most people are rational.

This week, we mainly watched two episodes of The Newsroom. The show give me a clear idea of how the newsroom runs and what’s the important element of a great show.

At the beginning of the show, The main character Will’s speech show a lot of problem of the media industry. For a journalist, don’t shows your own political opinion is actually importance, you won’t offended your audiences. Every move you made on the TV show won’t be ignored and the anchor’s choice will be judge be the audiences and no matter what there will be people against it. Internet troll are all over the society right now. If you have certain amount attention and fans, the internet troll will pay more attention on you and they will twist your opinion to get more attention. The speech Will made almost get his career over, his producer hopped and take most of his stuff with him afterward. But in my opinion, his speech was just telling the truth.

After the whole drama, they produced a great show. It really told us what’s the most important element of a great show. Jim, the senior producer became to be the center of that episode. He discovered the news which has potential and actively followed up. When his supervisor disagree with his thoughts, he didn’t shrink back, use his knowledge tried to get deeper news. At this point, he fortunately get some secret news from two of his informants. So the secret of success in the newsroom is that you need to have sharp observation, full of knowledge, good resources and good luck. That’s how you determine the right news. But run the show is a totally different story. It takes a whole team to create a show. The anchor Will don’t need teleprompter, the EP can pull things together really quick, and it need all kinds of assistant to create a complete show.

Through the story moving we can tell, Will is becoming a nice character on the screen, adjust the content of show for the audience rating over and over again, he forgot the original passion of making news, I think that is a problem for us right now. Unlike decades before, we only have six major companies are running the television, the competition has been brought to upper level. On one side, that’s a good sign, became people will have more motivation to create new things, but on the other side, producers will make compromise for better audience rating.

This week we had talked about how media can give you some wrong message and make you believe that’s true. And how power can severely effect people’s behaviors.

The documentary we watched in class about the prison experiment from Stanford really shocked me. The experiment is about make half of the random participants to be prisoner and  the rest of the participants to be the guard. The experiment restored the real since of the prison. At first, participants act like what I anticipated, they still acted like normal people outside of the prison. However, the guards start to feel power and things gets changed really fast. I am really shocked by how short they use to incorporated in to the character. Prisoner start to believe they are real prisoner, and because there’s no rules and interference, guards starts to abuse their power, the fake prison even gets more crazy than the real prison. People’s reactions to power really surprised me, the participants knows this is not real but they still gets serious because of the power they have.

The another example of power is people believed in what phone call says with no proof. A manger of a fast food restaurant gets a phone call from a person who claim to be a cop. He sounds like it, so the manager just believed it. He did what the ‘cop’ told him to do, which is to search one of the employee. There’s more unreachable things the ‘cop’ told the manager to do after the first one. And the manager didn’t even remember to check if that is a real cop. He was scared by the power. From a onlooker’s point of view, it is really hard to believe that really happened, but we are not in the moment, that’s how power and media can effect people.

What we can’s avoid these days is there always fake news, people are not likely to check the source of the news when they saw something really shocked them. Publisher sees that and use that when they edit their new in order to get more attention for their article.  It is really easy for people to believe what they saw on internet or any media, people already get used to moving fast right now, it seems like wasting time to check the source. We shouldn’t underrate the power of the media. When you have some negative thoughts, you will be more easy to be influenced by the media.

The invention of the television definitely changed people’s life. Before 1927, the television haven’t been invented, people’s life were totally different. Screen changed our life entirely. The invention of the television make people’s life more convenient and interesting, it allow us to get information, news at home and TV shows, games to entertain our life. In 1970s, it is really honor to have a television in China. The television helped a lot with promote the new strategy to people in our country. As we all know, China once was new build and pretty poor. The television helped with gather people together and spread the right direction to success.

I don’t know much about America television history, but Rod Serling is someone who can’t avoid when we talk about America television. He changed the whole industry of television. He worked really hard to push the television industry to develop. The influence he made still count today, the style of the TV shows he created we can still found in todays TV shows. He create a nice foundation for the future. Compare to Chinese TV show, America TV shows have more variety and more entertainment to watch. Most of the America TV shows can make you feel connect to it, because actor’s skill is really high. I think it give the credit to Rod Serling, because he has set the high stander at the first.