What are those negative functions of mass media?

Lazarsfeld and Robert. Merton in their paper "Mass Communication, Mass Appreciation, and Organized Social Action" discuss two positive and four negative functions of mass communication. (Positive and Negative Functions)

Positive Functions: ①The Function of Giving Social Status: Through various forms of news reporting, mass communication is able to give a prominent status to individuals, groups, social issues and social actions, making them the center of attention of the society. ② Reaffirmation of social norms: by publicizing behaviors that deviate from social norms, the mass media can arouse universal condemnation in society and place violators under strong social pressure, making them feel the "institutional pressure" to uphold social norms, thus forcing them to comply with social norms.

Lazarsfeld and Merton also point out that "the mass media is a powerful instrument that can serve both good and evil, and is more likely to do so if it is not properly controlled." The negative functions are as follows:

1) Anesthetizing the mind - long-term effect on the audience. The medium provides a pseudo-environment and constructs a mediated reality with symbols. Over-indulgence in superficial information and popular entertainment, indulging in illusory fulfillment, and loss of social mobility. The mass media tends to confuse the "real environment" with the "virtual environment" (media environment), and the public is overly dependent on the media, while the facts brought by the media are only a partial reproduction of the life situation, and do not represent a social tendency, which can lead to negative consequences if exploited.

②Conformity to the status quo. The content of criticism is ignored. The influx of information creates an overload of information, which leads to indifference to information. It also promotes "social conformism," which weakens the public's ability to discern and criticize society, and turns people into one-dimensional, status quo-compliant human beings.

3) Lowering the level of aesthetics and appreciation. The mass media should cater to the taste of the public.

4) The media take up or deprive people of their free time at a price. Schramm - The medium is a thief of time. It makes time vanish in diversion, entertainment and mediocrity.

5 Alienation. Critical school, Marx. Concerned with how people are alienated by commodities in a commoditized society, media advertising.

6 A large number of violent, bloody and pornographic contents and scenes in movies and TV networks bring negative impacts on society and affect the physical and mental health of viewers, especially the youth. Empirical school of research in the 20s and 80s.

7 National cultural survival and cultural identity crisis. The development of satellite direct television and the Internet has brought about the problem of national sovereignty in cross-cultural communication, posing a potential threat to the social system. Impact on the politics, economy, culture and society of the third world countries. American cultural imperialism, cultural hegemony, discourse.

Chen Shui-bian tried to emphasize the original culture of Taiwan's cultural history with textbooks and textbooks, trying to separate it from the mainland.

8 people rely too much on the indirect communication brought about by the media after the gradual reduction of interpersonal social interaction, and social groups gradually alienated strangers." TV people" "container people" - refers to those who will spend their leisure time entirely on the mass media will be their own thoughts and feelings, happiness, anger, sadness, etc. completely linked to the media content of the people, the concept of thought and even the way of action are derived from the TV, the extreme internalization of the self, psychological closure, unable to cope with the real world of all sorts of changes, and become a collection of media information "container" completely. They have become "containers" that collect information from the media.