In what ways does the presence of the mass media influence our perception of social problems in society today? How is this different than it was in...

The increasing ubiquity of media shape our perceptions to a degree that they almost become a substitute for personal experience. Especially given the growth of smartphones, people can live in an electronic bubble, barely perceiving the world outside a heavily mediated almost virtual reality.

For example, in the middle ages, the problem of poverty or economic inequality was understood through two major lens. The first was simply the personal experience of being poor or being...

The increasing ubiquity of media shape our perceptions to a degree that they almost become a substitute for personal experience. Especially given the growth of smartphones, people can live in an electronic bubble, barely perceiving the world outside a heavily mediated almost virtual reality.

For example, in the middle ages, the problem of poverty or economic inequality was understood through two major lens. The first was simply the personal experience of being poor or being a wealthy person who encountered poor people in everyday life. The second lens of viewing poverty as a social problem in the west was Christian theology, which both accepted poverty as inevitable, as "the poor are always with us", but also accepted the notion that it was the Christian duty of the better off to contribute to the welfare of the poor, with the Church often organizing social services on the parish level. 

Now, many people live in economically segregated neighborhoods, with the children of the wealthy ending up in private schools or upper or middle class public school districts and the poor also clustered together. Thus poverty is understood not as "the widow living above the blacksmith shop" or "the serfs on the estate of the Duke" but almost as a spectacle seen in the media. The average US resident now spends 11 hours a day on the average either connected to the internet or consuming some form of video (TV, video games, etc.).

This degree to which perceptions of social problems are mediated rather than experienced directly is further biased by the tendency of media to allow partisan filtering of sources. So, for example, a Republican stalwart might get most of his news from Fox news, which might illustrate the problem of poverty with a 60-second sound bite on one case of welfare fraud, while a Democrat might watch a story on NPR about disabled veterans having to live on cat food. 

Thus social problems become transformed by the ubiquity of the media into one of two things, either fodder for partisan politics or entertainment.