Television: A Distortion of Reality Television has become a false reality for millions of Americans and the majority of the global society. “The use of television to promote primarily materialistic values has become a severe, although largely unacknowledged, mental health and public health problem for the United States and the world” (Elgin 105). Duane Elgin speaks about the impact of television on the youth of our nation and how it is “being used to promote mindless consumerism around the planet” (Elgin 104). The negative effects of television are clear, and the reality is that this communication device is changing the important values of the global youth. The lucid shift in values has been from developing a meaningful philosophy in life to being well-off financially.
Government intervention into the media is a hot topic these days, filled with controversy and blame. Every group is pointing the finger at another group. Parents are blaming the government for not helping, government is blaming the media for not censoring material, and others are blaming the parents for not censoring and protecting their children. Our society is getting nowhere. there is no solid proof that the media causes violence, and although parents do a lot to help and protect their children, there are still some steps that can be taken to protect their children against violent and sexual material.
Amy Goldwasser’s, “What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” uses out of context statistics to create a cynical attack on some of the finest educational organizations today. She scoffs at accusations of the Internet, almost ignoring the fact that most teenagers do not use the Internet for academic or intellectual uses. After begging parents not to worry about their kids online (even though worrying is what protects our kids to begin with), she groups Common Core with the other contributors “of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager,” when unlike the uninformed, Common Core is fighting for our school systems to improve the educational system for our teenagers (Goldwasser, 236). If one of our most influential associations was not enough, the National Endowment for the Arts is beaten down with more out of context quotes used to side the reader with the Internet and against our helpful companion in the fight for ingenuity and innovative improvement. RWS 200 students will find Goldwasser’s article much less persuasive after understanding how the sources she uses, like Common Core and the NEA, are taken out of context in her whirl-winding assault against educational learning, and supporting the Internet.
This change of morality in the general music industry combined with the increasing influence of media could easily interfere with our moldable youths’ development. In this paper, I hope to study why this trend of decreasing morality exist in music and how this would affect our younger generations in terms of mental health. Music videos and lyrics are both tools that musicians can use to communicate with our society but whether the content is appropriate for our youth is the exigency of this issue. According to a research conducted by the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, teenagers ranging from 8-18 year olds are exposed to different kinds of media whether it is video games, movies, television or music for more than 7.5 hours per day (Rideout). The only activity that consumes more time than media in a teenager’s day is sleep.
She avidly believes that the pressures at home from parents on their children to do outstanding in school is linked to the reasons kids turn to drugs to make them focus harder and longer. One of the author’s main claims is that students believe that the drugs help them in school when in truth Warner’s research shows a negative link between academic progress and the use of these stimulants. She uses research and statistics to prove her claim of how students falsely believe the drugs progress their advancement in school. However, her other main claim on how the parents are responsible for their children abusing the drugs lacks hard evidence or proof of that being the main reason for students to lead to the drug misuse. She does make it clear that this article is strongly intended for parents of students, especially ones to put heavy pressure and expectations on their kids to do exceedingly well in
Ahmed 1 Sami Ahmed Professor Grannis English 112 7 December 2008 The Medias Affect on Teenagers The rise of violence and sexual activity in teenagers has placed the entertainment industry under scrutiny. Parents blame the industry for exposing their children to inappropriate content at a tender age. The industry has argued that the rating system at place should give the parents control over the content viewed by their children. Now let us find out whether the content of the media has an affect on teenagers? Or if it is the parent’s responsibility to regulate what teens watch?
Many people of our generation have adapted to this electronic world and don’t think about the other ways they could be spending their lives. Instead they live in these media based worlds and have Television take over instead of going out, enjoying the city, exercising, and playing sports. Too many of us nowadays are attached to these electronics and they influence our lives in a negative way. It just shows how simple media programs can contribute to someone’s life so extremely. Electronics have severely influence many people in our world.
Every day, teenagers all over America use some source of mass media. Using media is their way to communicate. Whether they are reading a newspaper, checking their smartphones, browsing the internet, or watching television, they are communicating in some way. By consuming the different forms of media, we can discover important events, news, or just find some entertainment to pass the time. Even through all the advantages the media makes available to us, the media also has some negative sides that can be harmful to the younger generation of Americans.
The culture of celebrity is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon that is made even more treacherous in the fact that it touches almost every American’s life. While many hold the conventional belief that celebrity dogma and vicarious living are mere entertainment and thus harmless, the public’s rising propensity towards celebrity worship and mindless ingestion of manipulated and often inaccurate information set forth by the media and popular public figures greatly contributes to the rising anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and overall incompetence in detecting our willful consumption of junk thought. If society is unable to recognize the repercussions celebrity culture will have on our collective ability to distinguish legitimate news from the erroneous and furthermore continues to advocate a general reluctance to transpose our rapturous enthusiasm from Britney Spears to issues far more worthy of our attention, such as war in Afghanistan, the climbing rates of foreclosure and unemployment, and global warming, the consequences will become progressively severe. The current and future implications of this seemingly innocuous movement include debased public discourse and politics, the proliferation of misinformation and erroneous reports relating to health issues and more, a diversion from intellectual endeavors, and an overall rejection of rationality. Celebrity culture and our nation’s infatuation with it is playing a significant role in producing a generation that is increasingly devoid of a defined criterion to assess the precariousness in conforming to the credo of a dumbed-down society where intellectualism and rationalism have far less value than the recklessly enticing ideas set forth by the mouthpieces of junk thought.
An employer who, for example, expects the employees to be disloyal and shirkers will likely treat them in a way that will elicit the very response he or she expects. 2. What evidence of self-fulfilling prophecies have you seen lately? Parents' beliefs about their children's involvement in unusual behaviors are variable and sometimes inaccurate, but they may be influential. This study is concerned with inconsistencies between parents' estimates and their children's reports of marijuana use, and children's subsequent usage later.