Identity.

Essay by prasanthUniversity, Bachelor'sA, October 2005

download word file, 9 pages 5.0

Creating an identity in today's media drenched world is not a simple task. With a turn of a magazine page or an easy flip of the TV channel there at our disposal is a huge array of potential identity replicas. In contemporary society, identity is continuously unstable; it must be selected, constructed and created with reference to inevitable surrounding media traditions. There are a variety of mediums from which people can pick and access information from such as radio, TV, Internet, or even cell phones. Consequently, the media holds a very powerful capacity to set a social issue for mass audience to assume and talk about. Often, media do not intentionally set the agenda and resolve the pros and cons of that particular matter, so it repeatedly causes terrible consequences towards public as well as establishes 'moral panics', which can sometimes direct to mob violence. This writing will argue that identity is a social construction, managed primarily by the contemporary media and created in relation to others and is it continually being changed in order to keep up with the altering society.

An individual's identity is formed by society in which media plays a predominant role. There is a daily interactive relationship between the subject and the object, that is, human agents and the conditions of their subsistence, respectively. Theories of the individual emphasize on differences between people and deem these differences as natural. Individuals are "constituted" as the possessors of positions throughout the effects of social relations. Alternatively, other theories of the topic concentrate on people's general experiences in society through watching TV, surfing the internet or reading the newspaper. It is these general experiences that are the most significant way of distinguishing who we are. Thus, subject identity is a social construction, not an ordinary one.

When we...