Growing up with the media
Everybody considers childhood to be the happiest period in one`s life. Why is it so? Let`s ask people of different ages, those who are only a little over twenty and those who are almost forty, what they remember most about their childhood. Do they remember running through the long dewy grass of a meadow or walking about the forest? Do they remember sitting in the kitchen and watching their mother cook something especially delicious? Nothing of a kind. Most people remember watching Saturday morning TV cartoons.
How influential media are nowadays. Let`s bring your memories up to date. What did you discuss with your friends not long ago? An article from a newspaper? A new book? An advertisement you noticed in a magazine? The answer will be quite definite. You are more likely to talk about new TV program, the episode from a popular TV series or a television commercial. It proves that TV plays a large and influential part in your life. This part is especially large in the life of children, who accept the media just as they accept their school, the house they live in, their family as part of their environment. Parents and teachers agree that all young people growing up with the media learn from them sometimes more than the adults wish them to do. Children may not realize how greatly the media influence them because in their lifetime they have always been there. When adults make fuss about the media being a bad influence, they usually are talking about television, the most powerful medium of all.
What does television impart to an uncritical audience? The scientists proved that watching television is psychologically addictive. The idea of becoming addictive to Television brings up questions involving subtle conditioning and brainwashing that could be friendly or vicious, altruistic or self-serving. In a commercial society the media`s ability to stimulate motivation to buy builds other people`s power. It can be power for good or power for bad but it`s always power for control. Every day children absorb hundreds items of information, they absorb ideas about behavior, about right and wrong and they are likely to do it uncritically. No doubt that some of the media`s output has long lasting value and worth, some is only cheap, tawdry and superficial stuff but physically, emotionally and intellectually harmful. The task of the adults in this situation is to protect their children from this harm and not to allow them to live in a cold virtual world, which the world of television can appear.