Hello everybody! Welcome back to Sierra's Weekly Sayings, where this week we will be discussing the idea of how social media influences our day to day lives. In the short story "Once Upon a Time" the author Nadine Gordimer tells of a bedtime story that has rather the opposite of a happy ending. It talks about how media and news can affect the way people view their own lives and the places they live in. Social media has a tendency to cause a large amount of panic whenever there is a threat anywhere in the world. This causes people to take more drastic actions then needed such as building a wall surrounding their home or putting up a new type of special lock system that is unnecessary. Another story that touches upon this is Barry Glassner's book The Culture of Fear where the author also speaks about how the more TV a person watches the more likely they are to being overly worried about situations that are less then likely to happen. I do believe that fear saturated media does have a large effect on peoples happiness because they spend so much time worrying about things that are most likely not to happen. I also believe that this could effect the criminal justice system because since people are more and more worrying about crime that the people will have an effect on crime justice such as longer prison time and harsher punishments that are uncalled for at most times. Overall I completely agree with the idea that media effects peoples happiness.

The picture above is an example of how media can have an effect on peoples lives and happiness. To end this blog, a quote that I find quite interesting about media
" The media's the most powerful thing on earth, they have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent. Because they control the minds of the masses." -Malcolm X