The Revolution of Social Media

Jason GallacchiProfessor Browning

English 101

MTV is a social media network that in present day airs mostly reality TV shows.

·Ever Since The Real World aired in 1992, MTV has never looked back.

·MTV broke loose of it’s music origins and continued into the “Real World”

MTV as a corporation would impact many viewers thoughts and beliefs.

MTV continuously uses its large viewing audience to convey what is considered masculine and feminine, or what is considered popular or geeky. MTV reinforces a structure which was already created for those who watch to live by.

Popular Geeky masculine feminine

In a lot of the MTV shows, the writers try to introduce the audience into the show.

·With the audience so involved, we can see why people try to bring these reality television shows into their life.

·For every fight between girlfriend and boyfriend, the audience gets a perfect view of the action which is addicting and intriguing to watch

The show takes 8 people from the Jersey Shore area and forces them to live together.

The show’s main ingredient is alcohol which usually leads to the drama/fighting.

Jersey Shore

Children and young teenagers watch MTV while they are still easily manipulated.

Children watching MTV

·So we see young adults changing to what the station deems as popular, masculine, feminine, and what is considered good or bad.

“They show us how to dress, look and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of

norms, values, practices, and institutions.”

Douglas Kellner

While the Jersey shore seasons were prime South Park also noticed the phenomena of people conforming to the Jersey Shore characteristics.

South Park V.S. Jersey Shore

South Park Described Jersey Shore as a plague crossing the U.S.

Teen mom is another show on MTV that follows 4 pregnant teenage mothers.

Teen Mom

·MTV brings the idea of teenage pregnancy and places it in the spotlight in front of these children and young teens.

From my experience, I know that having a kid at the age of 16 and 17 was bad and those mothers were deemed worthless.

·Now since MTV brought teenage pregnancy to spotlight, the show invites the audience in the struggle with the teen parents, thus making the audience more accepting of teenage mothers. This can increase the rate of teen moms.

“The Teen Mom stars earn $60,000 to $65,000 per season,” a series insider tells Life & Style.

Now that people know these teenage mothers were praised with spotlight and money, it is more likely for teenagers to become pregnant due to less reinforcement of the social norm that being a Teen mom is a bad thing.

MTV used to be all about music, instead or reality television shows.

Old MTV

MTV’s intentions went down hill soon after they saw how many more viewers they had when The Real World hit the station. Now music television is gone and Reality Television is here.

Those who are in power at MTV want to keep their power so they will do anything to get the views, which means giving the audience what they came for.

Why would MTV abuse it’s power?

alcohol fighting sex

Constant demand from audience for drama. MTV is a corporation in a goal to bring in as

much viewers as possible MTV doesn’t make something popular, the

station just reinforces these popular ideas created by the viewers.

The reason’s MTV airs Reality Television

MTV needs to stop abusing it’s power. MTV has the chance to positively change these

young viewer’s lives for the better. MTV could make a show about people working together instead of people working against each other.

MTV would rather show what is popular and cool.

There are plenty of opportunities to do well with these social media stations. The stations just need to stop being greedy with each other in a competitive fashion and work together to help the people of the U.S. to be more unified with one another.

Without competition between the stations, this will eliminate the competition for views, and will eliminate meaningless shows leading to a more unified society.

Conclusion