“Within that societal curriculum, the media serve as pervasive, relentless, lifelong educators… so-called entertainment media… have a major impact in shaping beliefs, attitudes, values, perceptions, and “knowledge” and influencing decisions and action.( Cortes, “Who is Maria?” 75) (Yosso, Challenging deficit discourse about Chicanas/os,p52)

Speaking of the negative impact and influence of social media has brought to me, I always have a lot to say because I’ve suffered from it and struggled with myself for a long time.
I was born and grew up in Xinjiang, the Uyghur autonomous region of China in the northwest of the country, home to many ethnic minority groups. As for the ethnic group of Uyghur, there has been a huge issue since a long time ago, but the fact is that because of the politics, the history and other factors, some Uyghur people, especially those in the south part had no chance to be educated and lived under extremely poor condition. Gradually, they started to do some bad things, stealing, robbing, and even hurting people, and made a bad reputation for the whole group. I became so aware that some people don’t like people from Xinjiang when I went to college in Beijing. They watched the TV news, the report, the videos on the internet of Uyghur’s crime, and they assumed that all people from Xinjiang are mostly the same, no matter which ethnic group they are in. The message sent from the media sometimes could be so misleading for outsiders since it only, only focuses on the bad and negative side. I hated others asking me where I came from because I couldn’t bear the weird expressions in their eyes and sometimes the worse reaction when I told them my hometown.

Though a few times the media conveyed the bright side of Xinjiang, there were still something untrue and would mislead others as well. What’s worse is that even under the school context, students could not get the real information. For example, my college classmates asked me several questions when they knew I was from Xinjiang, “Do you guys ride horses to school?” “You actually eat watermelons around a stove?”. I was too shocked to answer them and kept wondering how they came up with these stupid questions. However, the shocking fact was that they learned all these from elementary textbooks, and their teachers affirmed as well. For example, there were idioms like “Wearing fur coats in the morning but yarn top at noon.” and “Eat watermelons around the stove”. The original intention of these idioms was to point out the dramatic temperature difference between day and night, they worked but also misled a lot of people. Besides, even now, TV shows and movies are not delivering the real message of Xinjiang by only focusing on the southern part where people live in Mongolian yurts and ride horses.

There are actually a lot of things that teachers, educators can do to give students chances to get the real information about the world and to think critically about the twisted facts sent via media.