Scholarly Paper for Midterm

ABSTRACT

This paper talks of the influence of mass media to society's ethical actions. The influences studied vary according to which aspects of the society is influenced by the media content fed to the consumers by the media providers. There is the influence on the youth, which is the main concern of the study, as the student himself is under this age category; effects on children, who are the most vunerable and receptive of all media consumers, being unable to discern among different sorts of media content; how it affects the workplace and its people, as they run the society's affairs vital to its survival; the polity which can generate waves of media interest through its activities regarding governance; how beneficial or dexstructive it can be to education and many others. It will also talk of ethical issues and concepts regarding the influences it has on the society, and the useful suggestions on making ethical decisions that will, ultimately, affect the social activities of the community.

MASS MEDIA INFLUENCE ON SOCIETY

Media plays an important role in the everyday affairs of the society. It intrudes on every move made by every member of the society. Every action and decision made by individuals are usually based on the content they get from media. Sometimes, with technological difficulties wherein media is sometimes barred from entering the home or the workplace, the human is completely lost in confusion, and he craves for some media content to go on with his work and life. (Burtina, 2005)

Burtina (2005) goes on to say that even though the experiences people have had shape their decisions and actions, commercial advertisements influence a lot of other aspects of a person's life. Economically, people spend for what they see to be good on TV, newspaper or radio advertisements, and it affects the youth most especially. They tend to go after what they see on the celebrities they idolize, so they buy everything they see the celebrities endorse. They become superficial and self-conscious because they see the celebrities as role models.

Media evolved from the most crude of technologies fifty years ago from the telegraph, the radio, newspapers, magazines, the television and now the internet in which we rely on to be bases of how we live.

We trust the media to give us content to help us along with whatever we need to do. The average person reads the paper or watch the TV before he even does anything upon waking up. We are soncerned about the weather, national economical status, the lives of our favorite sports or showbiz celebrities and many others that we rely on media content for.

Romantic relationships are common in various media content with storylines such as film, TV and theater. They lure the audiences using their own human inclinations to affection.

How does this go in accordance to everyday life? In a college survey, 60% said that mass media does not accurately portray their romantic relationships. However, 90% said that the media does influence their perception of romance.

There had been a dramatic increase on the portrayal of romance on media content throught the ages. In her book titled Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Eva Illouz says:

"Until the middle of the 1920s middle class magazines tended to espouse a conservative, Victorian consumer ethos congruent with family oriented ideals and values. As magazines came to adopt the flamboyant style of the working class? the romantic manner in which they portrayed couples dramatically increased."

How Mass Media Influence Works

Images of violence, advertising, sex, fame and much more are being fed by the media everyday. The local media scene is dominated by the biggest media organizations in the Philippines like:

ABS-CBN
GMA
Manila Bulletin
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Philippine Star

These media organizations give majority of the everyday supply of content. They own the major entertainment movie studios, television and radio broadcast networks and programing and video news and sports entertainment, but they also venture to telecommunications, video game softwares, music recordings and electronic media.

Because of acquisitions, mergers and takeovers, media companies had grown large enough to really shape and influence the masses. This power they exude gives consumers the accountability of responsibility over the media content the consume.

On The Youth

Teen sex is a “major public health problem” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (Hart). Teen sexual activity, together with its working with a person's dimensions and all the complications result in difficult teen issues like early pregnancy, STDs and others. Media influences teens' emotional well-being with their content, resulting in physical difficulties. For example, unrealistic body images as that of animated shows or skinny models develop in teens an urgent, burning desire to be just like that. Unhealthy eating beaviors manifest in teen lifestyles, especially to the girls in attempts to get the celebrity image they want.

This kind of influence used to be assigned to family and social relationships, but it is undeniable that teens learn about society and sexual relationships from visual media images portraying body types, clothing, and other cultural norms portayed by media content. Media can command natural-sounding norms and enforce new ways of thinking unimaginable in the past.

According to Hart, prefer to see sexual material from media than ask of it from their parents. In a study of prime-time television shows popular among young viewers, sexual references accounted for as much as 50% of character interactions. These programs tend to portray sex as a recreation rather than its essence of reproduction among married people and further shows men to be aggressors of the women which, as shown by these shows, are objects of sex valued for the physiques.

Hart further states that MTV used to bring music videos as additional entertainment to what was just once pure music. But the music videos allowed the artists, musicians and video creators to add more to the music than what it just is by the visuals they experiment on. What would have been a simple song can be transformed into a dance phenomenon because of the video created to promote it. With this means, sex had been added to entice the viewers, which is primarily the youth to focus more on the acts seen than on the music playing with it. Instead of helping the audience understand the song and its message, the videos tend to divert the attention of the viewers. Furthermore, even the music itself at present uses sex to sell itself. Sexually explicit lyrics, together with a provocative video make commercialized sex available to just about everyone.

Video games, TV shows and movies, music and Web sites are sources of news content that is never without stories of violence from all around the world. These messages largely shape the imagination of the youth, as they, as readers and spectators share the experience.

Cause-and-effect situations prevail in this context. Most media content also show consequences of the actions, but the actions had still been done and shown. A student need not necessarily start shooting people in school because he saw some shooting in campus from a movie he saw, but the effect is there, imprinted in his mind. (Malcolm, 2009)

Malcolm quotes Sr. Elizabeth Thoman, a member of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary and executive director of the Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles, California as saying, “The impact may not be on potential perpetrators, but on the rest of the population, who begin to believe that violence is inevitable, that crime is everywhere and that they must be afraid.” Thoman’s center produces media literacy programs for schools across the country.

USA President Clinton convened a summit and promised an ongoing national campaign against youth violence, while USA Vice President Al Gore announced a new agreement with on-line providers to restrict violent material, changes that would “honor the lives of those who were killed.”

Entertainment executives defend their products by saying that it would take an already disturbed person to act out the shooting he saw on TV or the shooting he did in a video game as a first person shooter to real life and kill real people.

Media affects health, not just on the young, but everybody. Media organizations, especially advertising firms, earn millions from the manufacturers with the media campaigns they create. Teenagers buy what they see on TV, especially after testimonials from their favorite celebrities.

There are positive and negative effects of media advertisements on the youth. For example, physical exercises together with proper diets, as the "in" thing to do to get the celebrities' curves are good influences for the young people. However it can't be helped that the cigarette industry just has to use famous celebrities to promote their products, so teens also get influenced with smoking.

How movie and television stars look is the epitome of a successful life among many teenagers. Their maintained good looks, together with the money they earn, is a good thing to look up to. So teenagers tend to wear the clothes the stars wear, use the things the stars use, and move like the stars would. They buy the products promoted by the celebrities to be accepted by their peers.

To get killer figures, health issues also abound among teenagers, especially anorexia and obesity which some media advocacies also fight against. Media advertises food, sometimes junk food, but it also imparts that being thin and wealthy is a good image as that of supermodels.

Children

First-graders as critics

Robinson has found the most receptive audiences in very young children. Even children in older grades already have their viewing patterns established, she said. “I’m finding the first-graders to be incredibly astute at looking at their shows and critiquing them,” Robinson said.

Robinson noted how the children at St. Philip’s have carried their newfound media skills into their homes. They are encouraged to see critiquing the media as a way of taking care of their younger brothers and sisters -- “to see this as a collective responsibility,” she said.

The children are also bringing the message back to their parents. “There are some parents struggling with their own issues with media, and this is part of the very emotional response I get at times,” Robinson said. She said one mother told of how her elementary school-age daughter challenged her father’s preference for action films, leading to dialogue about the violence in the movies he was bringing home.

Many parents are naive about what messages their children are receiving, said Robinson, a mother of three children in their late teens and early 20s. “All TV, all movies are educational,” she said. “What are they learning? If you step back and look critically, some of the messages are very frightening. ... Violence is entertaining, sex is no big deal, the more things I have the happier I’ll be -- those are the three big messages I see.”

Robinson recalled a lesson she gave to a third-grade class at another parochial school. When she brought up video games, “two boys way in the back jumped up and machine-gunned the class,” she said. “The response was strong and automatic and violent. That was part of their favorite video game.”

She questioned media leaders who say that the violent entertainment they produce has no effect. “In that half-hour program there are 25 commercials -- because media is an effective way to sell things,” she said. “So how can they say they’re not selling violence as entertainment, as fun, as funny?”

In late April, the Center for Media Literacy launched a Web site funded by grants from religious communities and devoted to the topic of violence and the media (www.medialit.org/Violence/indexviol.htm). The center was “literally in the midst of uploading pages” when the story from Littleton broke, Thoman said. The stories of the killers’ media influences -- music, video games and the Internet -- began to hit the newscasts, and the latest round of public debate fired up again.

Thoman has not seen the nature of that debate change much since 1993, when the center launched a campaign on media violence. “After the Littleton experience, we still hear the same questions -- does watching violence cause violence?” she said.



References

Abdulwasea, M. Yemen Times Issue: (1168), Volume 16 , From 30 June 2008 to 2 July 2008 Retrieved August 22, 2009 from http://yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=1168&p=opinion&a=3

Burtina, Tatyana December 8 2005. Media Influence in our society. Retrieved August 22, 2009) from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/13871/media_influence_in_our_society.html

Clay, R.A. Volume 34, No. 2 February 2003 Unraveling new media's effects on children
Retrieved August 22, 2009 from http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/unraveling.html

Hart, E.M. (n.d.) Teens, Sex and Media: The Influence of Electronic Entertainment on American Teen Sexual Culture: A Reason to Revive Rhetoric in English Teacher Education Programs. Retrieved August 22, 2009 from http://www.frankwbaker.com/MediaLitEd.pdf

Malcolm, Teresa. May 28, 1999. Teen Violence: Does violent media make violent kids? Retrieved August 22, 2009 from http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/052899/052899a.htm

Mass Media Influence on Society. Retrieved August 22, 2009 from http://hubpages.com/hub/Mass-Media-Influence-on-Society

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