We live in a world where everything you do online requires some sort of consent. People can resist, reject or negotiate content. Let’s be honest, we don’t always read the Term’s and Condition’s, nor do we decline cookies because we completely disregard what they have to say in that moment; all we want is to get where we want to go.
It never comes into consideration how consent is manufactured. Media costs more than the consumers will ever pay so advertisers pay for the audiences. They know how to influence the news narrative so people become blind into thinking the news is always right. If you ever wanted to challenge power you will be pushed to the margins and would probably not be taken seriously. In order to manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target and this is communism, terrorists, immigrants. Consent is being manufactured all around us, all the time and we may not even realise it. Digital media nowadays manipulates consumers in so many ways but very explicitly.
Sorry to say but we’re all just a bunch of sheep. We follow one another and fall into the same traps that the media put on us. It’s blatant that whatever we accept to has some sort of catch to it but we refuse to read it and then WE become the victim. The media manufacture consent by finding out what could easily break us and use it against us in any point in time. It’s horrible, I know. However, the digital age has developed massively that we don’t recognise the right from wrong anymore, everything changes.
References
https://aeon.co/videos/is-mass-media-still-manufacturing-consent-in-the-internet-age
I agree with what you said, I will accept the Google agreement every time, but I will never look at its content because it is too much. In order to avoid falling into the big trap that the media sets for us, media literacy is important for us to develop critical thinking and not blindly believe that the media is right. We need to learn to distinguish the sources of information from the experts, to analyze the news ourselves and check the facts, to understand the motives behind media news releases,
I think all the points you have mentioned are key. The way in which, almost without realizing it, we allow any web page to access a large amount of personal data with a simple click. I think it is very important that we are more aware of these things since today we live in a very advanced society in constant development and we cannot allow these types of things. A very interesting and complete post!
I agree with the belief that at the end of the day, the audience is ‘sheep’ without even realizing it. It’s a harsh truth, yet you have proven to how simple things like ‘accepting cookies,” can matter more than to what meets the eye. I appreciate how this post is written to feel like a genuine blog post, and that you included your thought process on how oblivious society can be without a consciousness of this issue.