They are controlling us #socialmedia #television #newschannels

By calling ‘they’ means news channels. The viewers of television are decreasing persistently due to the emergence of internet and social media. Websites like You Tube now provide almost every show telecasted on television. Although the internet has taken over the viewers of television, still there is a large population who watch television, so more specifically we can say that viewing duration of television has been decreased in past years.

Another significant rationale of this shift is that the people can choose and watch anything of their fascination in contrast to the television where they have to wait for their favorite shows to be telecasted. Internet is much like a super store where you can pick anything of your delight and don’t have to rely on others or wait for your turn.

Let’s see what people in our country are watching for the past years. News channels are the most watched channels in Pakistan, really? Is news so important for the people or they get something else there? After the busy and tiring schedule of the day people need entertainment to get refresh and relax, and for this purpose they are watching news channels instead of entertainment shows, so are they getting some sort of entertainment from these channels? which may be breaking news or experts’ talk on the current affairs. The buzz these days is about the marriage of Imran Khan for the third time and you see people discussing about it. Does it really affect the life of everyone? Should I be really concerned about that? Or my concern should be something else. Why don’t we think productive when we meet why we discuss others, this is the last thing we should be doing. This is just an example, this news will pass by like other news and people will forget about it. Wait they need something else to discuss when they meet, so tell them the next great breaking news.

After watching a current affair show the expert’s opinion on a hot topic reflects in our discussion and we don’t even get to know when it becomes a word of mouth and then most of us turn to have a same opinion without even thinking, only few disagree. That means the experts there have a power to control our discussions or may be our minds. They will talk about whatever they want to feed our minds.

Now what if an expert we are following on a news channel is not really an expert, but in fact he is just a puppet of another real expert which can be a high level government official, an opposition leader, law enforcing agencies or anyone who can enforce his power over them. As television and social media highly influence people it can be used by these real experts to control our minds, but only if we let them do it.

Besides this regular news there are some issues which need to be taken seriously and must not be treated like other breaking news. Zainab’s murder case started with a big noise and remained top trend on Twitter for two days and now two weeks have passed her body has been buried, her murderer is still free somewhere and it seems like there is a complete silence. We treated it like another breaking news and this is not the first time, we always do that. It is like a road accident or a fight in my city where people gather immediately and jam the roads, just for the amusement and without helping they pass comments and leave and look for another unconcerned incident. The way we treated Zainab is the same we stopped, looked, passed comments and left for another unconcerned breaking news.

Why are we doing that? May be we have a lot of useless time, may be we are so stressed out that we need amusement of any kind, and may be for remaining out of trouble we are unable to think big and do something productive for our country.