Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Hijacked Media: What it means, especially to you

Inverted Thoughts is providing its own analysis for an interesting topic of Hijacked media, the link to the original article is at the bottom of this article,

 
A buzzword in most social media circles that can be seen in the United States of America for quite a while now is “Hijacked Media”. As a name, Hijacked Media sounds as if it has the potential to cause the largest of disturbances to any person, any institution, any society, and the world on a whole. Well, it may not necessarily change the world overnight; it does however, have the strength to cause a definitive reaction to take place, one that effectively starts the process of change. In the simplest of terms, Hijacked Media can be referred to as the highly-disturbing negative imagery of ingredients that have the capacity to threaten human health.
It is a well known fact that there are a large number of ingredients that go into making packaged foods. Among these many ingredients are also a host of different chemicals and by products that are used for reasons ranging from preservation to non-spoilage to volume-building. One of the ends that hijacked media would serve here would be to make known to people the dangers of consuming such and such product. To best understand this, one could look at a term coined by the media itself: Pink Slime. Pink Slime refers to lean beef meat that has been procured from trimmings, which is further treated with ammonium hydroxide, flash frozen, processed some more, and then channelized to packaging, where it could be further ground. Imagine having a serving of that!
So, what purpose did hijacked Media serve over here? Well, quite a few. Firstly, since it is social media, it locked onto a term that would stick to every consumers head. Pink Slime, no matter how you look at it, is almost certainly not something that you would be able to or want to digest. More importantly, it justified the food product being just that: a nutritionally impotent and highly processed food, that had the potential to cause problems related to reproduction; while suspiciously, the FDA had given it its approval. It caused consumers to get more active and knowledgeable about the food they eat. Following the first outbreak of the ‘Pink Slime Controversy’, a Texan mom, Bettina Elias Siegel used her personal blog, ‘The Lunch Tray’ to start a signature campaign against the serving of such beef in schools across America, and within eight days, garnered more than 200,000 signatures. The result: Schools across the US stopped serving the product, and even malls and cold storages stopped providing it to customers. Sure, it led Beef Products Inc., producer of ‘Pink Slime’, to sue ABC News for $1.2 Billion in losses, but the damage (or should we say, the repair) was already done. In a stark opposition of earned media, where the positive feedback of the customer led to the growth of the service of product, this kind of media attention is sure to make consumer and the producer/processor more cautious than ever!

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