Mass media is a culture where images, sounds, and spectacle intertwine in daily life, dominating leisure time, shaping political opinions and social behaviors, offering materials from which people construct their own identities. Radio, television, film, and other products of the mass media culture industry create patterns: we learn what it means to be a man or a woman, successful or a failure, to have power or not. Journalism creates materials from which many form a sense of class, ethnicity and race, nationality, sexuality, group identity, the idea of „us” as opposed to „them.” Media culture helps shape the general worldview and fundamental values: it defines what is considered good or bad, positive or negative, moral or immoral. Media stories and images provide the symbols, myths, and resources that help form a common culture for the majority of individuals in many parts of today’s world. The media provides materials from which identities are created, through which individuals insert themselves into capitalist societies and which produce a new form of global culture.
Diverse types of media privilege either sight, or hearing, or combine them, while appealing to a wide range of emotions, feelings, and ideas. Media is industrial culture organized according to the model of mass production and is intended for a broad audience, depending on types (genres), which respect formulas, codes, and conventional replies. Thus they become a form of commercial culture and their products become commodities that try to attract profit, being manufactured by gigantic corporations interested in the accumulation of capital. Media targets the general public, so it must resonate with current themes and concerns, as this type of culture is very topical, offering hieroglyphs of contemporary social life.
But on the other hand, it is a high-tech culture. It is a dynamic economic sector, one of the most profitable and of major importance. Media is, thus, a form of techno-culture, which combines culture and technology into new forms and configurations, producing new types of societies in which media and technology become organizing principles.
Media shows who has power and who doesn’t, who is allowed to use force and violence and who isn’t. The power of these forces is dramatized and legitimized, and the weak are shown that if they do not conform, they risk punishments such as imprisonment. It is, therefore, important for those who live and die in a media and consumer society to learn to interpret and critically analyze its meanings and messages. In contemporary media culture, the dominant means of information and disconnection are a profound and often poorly perceived source of cultural pedagogy; they help educate us by showing us how to behave and what to believe, feel, think, what to fear and what to desire or not desire. Consequently, a primer in media criticism is an important source for the individual and citizen to learn how to cope with this insulating cultural environment. The ability to decipher, critique, and resist media manipulation can make individuals more powerful in their relationship with media and dominant culture. It can increase individual sovereignty vis-à-vis media culture and give individuals more power over their cultural environment, as well as the literacy needed to produce new forms of culture.
Douglas Kellner considers that society and culture are contested terrains and that cultural artifacts are effective products in a given context. Since the forms of culture produced by gigantic media conglomerates are an immediate and comprehensive aspect of contemporary life, and since media culture is both constituted by and a constitutive part of the wider social and political dynamics, then this is an excellent lens for illuminating the nature of contemporary society, politics, and everyday life.
An understanding of popular films, stars, music of different forms and conceptions, as well as television news is necessary to understand contemporary society. This means that if we understand why certain artifacts (myths, legends, etc.) are popular, we can shed light on the social environment from which they emerged and where they circulate, and thus we can provide an understanding of what is happening in contemporary societies and cultures.
In conclusion, we must recognize that the principles of current culture are formed and maintained by mass media. Regardless of whether it is fashion, sports, religion, political and social conceptions, or social behavior, the media has the strongest say in promoting them in society. These things, combined with the struggle for ratings, currently lead to the promotion of manipulative models, with journalism based on envy, conflict, excessive curiosity, and the idea of man as centrum mundi, which makes him receptive to extreme social stimuli of existing subcultures and countercultures; thus, prejudices are very current. The idea of this television show is innovative, based on the perception of prejudices as myths and legends from a social and scientific perspective but with an entertaining character and is based on the principle of „everything is funny.”
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