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Opinions of Thursday, 18 April 2019

Columnist: Prince Bayi Yahaya

Media, school of life

Social Media is a major source of news content Social Media is a major source of news content

The media since its inception has played an important and active role in the development of human life, through its information delivery role. To this, it gives information to humans as to how to live their lives for the benefit of society. It is therefore not surprising that the evolution of the 21st century media has created a lot of space for people to share and receive information at a very faster and convenient mode.

This enormous change is due to technological change in the contemporary world. Even though this technological change comes with its own challenges, it still makes communication more effective and efficient for people. For example the time where letters were delivered by post offices has changed to using emails, Electronic Message Sending (EMS), Facebook messenger as well as WhatsApp messenger.

But even more intriguing is the change in the delivery of letters and information via the post this is because in time past, a letter could take weeks or even months before it could reach the recipient but now they have advanced a little bit to taking about three to five working days to deliver a message.

In addition, the media also update us with current and trending issues in and around the world. These information can most at times be gotten from various radio and television stations like the Joy FM 99.7, Adom FM 106.3, Citi FM 97.3, Radford FM 107.5, GTV, TV3, JoyNews TV, Al-Jazeera, CNN, VOA, BBC, newspapers such as Daily Graphic, Ghanaian times, The mirror, telegraph among others including news websites, magazines and posters.

It is also worthy of noting the role that the media lays in shaping the lives of people in their behaviors most especially the youth. Undoubtedly, the youth of today are so engulfed with social media such that they could spend a whole day on Facebook and WhatsApp chatting with friends and commenting as well as updating their status on the various social media platforms. Many youth of today hardly listen to the radio nor watch televisions. And even when they do, they listen to profane songs and watch novellas, pornographic movies, and season movies among many other uneducated programs.

And as they continue to watch and listen to these stuffs, they tend to put them into practice thereby changing their lifestyles and wearing a whole different life that would conform to what the actors and actress in the movie have shown.

Despite the aforementioned technological challenges, the media creates a favorable environment for people to learn new things and offer greater opportunities for the youth to develop their talent because whatever information that one needs could be found on the internet. The media have grown up to a limit that access to information is not as difficult as it was some decades ago, it is therefore important for the people to take advantage of the opportunity to develop their talents in order to improve upon their innovative and creative skills to be help solve the crisis in this contemporary world.