We can directly relate to this concept because individuals of society are products of the media. This is true due to how individuals comprehend information presented through the media. For example how someone interprets one article on a topic may interpret another article on the same topic differently due to bias of the authors point of view. This allows for media to govern individuals to feeling or thinking a certain way in regards to a topic. This concept is prevalent in advertisements, for instance one's style or preference for hair products can be tailored towards how the media markets their product.
Companies try to create a consistent message with their products in order to create a notion of how one should appear or act. An example of this is how the media uses women who all look similar to advertise products or how workout advertisements use people who are extremely in shape and more muscular then the average person.
The media governs society as it subconsciously tells consumers what not to do and what to do, as the media depicts what is acceptable in a particular view. Other then beauty product advertisements and advertisements in general, what other ways do the media govern society?
I find that the media governs society in that is performs what Alice Marwick calls emotional labour, which is ``controlling ones emotions to “induce or suppress” your audiences feelings`` (Marwick, 351), relatively suggesting that Media companies can influence us through means of controlling behavior through trends that we the users make ourselves. This may not answer what other ways, but it relevantly applies to the methods in which media controls audiences, by having users `like` the content we make and by having other users reproduce (Share) it themselves. When we produce this content, we do what Christian Fochs argues in book ``Social Media’s International Division of Labour`` how media ``is difficult to perceive as being labour``(Fuchs, 228), implying that when users are active on social media, they are not aware of the extensively laboring hours it takes to produce their content that can be used by media sites. Essentially, we control ourselves based on the content we produce that we accept as normal and media companies realize that by us doing the work, we can govern ourselves.
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