Here’s how your favorite media platforms shape your world view without you realizing it

Canadians spend the equivalent of a five-day work week online.

That figure doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Behind all those hours is a multibillion-dollar industry, powerful enough to influence the way you think, perceive and understand the world. 

According to a 2021 Canadian Media Concentration Research Project report, the media industry accounted for $90 billion US. That’s the equivalent of 70 per cent of the worldwide oil and gas industry, which accounted for $128.1 billion US in 2017, according to Statistics Canada. 

Despite its magnitude, many Canadians know woefully little about how the media industry works. 

While the media, like other multi-billion dollar industries, operates within a commercial framework, it stands apart in its ability to shape beliefs and worldviews on an unprecedented scale.

A paradigm shift in the late 20th century is responsible for the shift in the way media operates, including a shift towards privatization.

Media’s fundamental power gave rise to a central tension that media scholars and industry professionals examine to this day: What is the balance between media’s profitability and its duty to serve the public interest, if any? 

Journalism, on its own, has long been rooted in the mission to hold power to account. Yet, in the face of financial pressures, news organizations must find ways to stay afloat — often at the cost of their core principles.

With the journalism industry becoming increasingly dependent on paid advertisements and subscriptions, media workers are burdened with what scholars call the digital divide. The term is used to describe the tension between serving the public or resorting to becoming mere profit generators for their investors.

While technology can sometimes be used to create a more informed and democratic world, it can also widen the gulf by fueling an already polarized media ecosystem. 

Approaching media with a critical perspective can help us understand how the landscape works and why it’s important, Whether content is created in the name of public interest or profitability, it plays a crucial role in shaping our worldviews. 

But that’s not it. The medium – including social media and traditional news media – in which the content we consume appears, is as important as the content itself.

As Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian communication theorist put it, “the medium is as important as the message.” 

We then ask ourselves: what is the real role of media in the construction of identity and the development of our tastes and desires?

The more we consume tailored messages, the more we become homogenized with our echo chambers — the physical or digital environment in which a person encounters beliefs or opinions that only coincide with their own. 

This phenomenon can play a part in creating further polarization in personal ideologies, which can potentially fuel hate and the othering of opposing views.  

Given the role media plays in shaping conversations in our society, Jurgen Habermas’ 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere coined the media as the “public sphere.” 

The German philosopher and social theorist views this term as being a space for the expression of debate and dialogue about important ideas in society. 

With the media becoming increasingly commercialized and stakeholders continuing to only look out for their interests, what do these conversations look like and how are they manipulated to uphold one party’s financial interests? 

All in all, commercial media can enable or disable democracy, it can fuel hate or unite different groups, and it can subtly or dramatically influence our daily lives.

In the end, it’s our individual responsibility to become media literate and understand how media is shaping us.

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Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.