How the Media Influences Youth

How the Media Influences Youth

In today’s society, media plays an enormous role in what is interpreted as cool or how everyone should look or act.  Smoking commercials, alcohol commercials, beauty and clothing advertisements, and violent and provocative advertisements are undoubtedly shaping society.  They all shape and reflect social values, provide new information which is usually inaccurate, and act as a source of observational learning by providing models which teenagers may try to imitate, as told by Jess Wiener on CNN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwXbEDDbS6E

One of the biggest ways that the media influences the media is the way it portrays body image.  This is by far the most distorted media strategy of advertising.  In almost every commercial, especially clothing advertisements, the women and men in them are gorgeous with slim and cut-up bodies.  It makes it seem as if you have to look this way to be good looking and cool.  Models especially help distort the way people ‘should’ look.  They are extremely skinny and usually are very pretty.  However, an interesting fact is that the majority of models are considered obese.  This is because they have more fat on their body than lean mass.  I find it interesting because so many overweight girls will develop an eating disorder in order to become skinny and look like a model, or look the way the media wants them to look, when models are considered to be obese anyway.   69% of girls in a recent survey said that magazine models influence their idea of perfect body shape.  Since 1970, eating disorders have grown 400%.  This is because as years progress, the image everyone sees in the media is distorted.  A lot of the advertisements and billboards are completely photo-shopped and computers are used to turn an average looking woman into a beautiful model.  An example of this can be seen in this Youtube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U.  This clip demonstrates how the media truly is not accurate at all and tricks youth into believing what everyone is supposed to look like.  Girls who aren’t even teenagers yet are becoming more and more aware of these media distortions.  They are becoming weight conscious at eight years of age, and a recent statistic shows that 80% of nine-year-old girls are on diets already.  Another clip from the Dove Self-Esteem Fund shows how the beauty industry sells products and influences young adults: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei6JvK0W60I.  In another recent survey by Teen People magazine, 27% of girls said that the media pressures them into having a perfect body.  The media does not only affect adolescent females, though.  The amount of males in today’s society that are influenced by the media is also inclining at a steady pace.  More and more males are becoming self conscious about their body shape and base their knowledge of a ‘perfect body’ from the way media portrays it.  Many males are turning to anabolic steroids, dietary supplements, and are becoming obsessive weight trainers.  As Susan Bordo points out in “Beauty (Re)Discovers the Male Body,” clothing advertisements such as Calvin Klein do not even advertise their clothes in their ads.  They will be advertising their jeans, but the picture will be from the beltline up of a very muscular man.  Hollister, American Eagle, and many other clothing lines all use this strategy.  It’s almost like they want you to believe that if you buy the jeans you will transform into the muscular figure.  This is media’s way of showing what the ‘perfect body’ is supposed to look like.  Obviously, they are not going to have a fat man in jeans with his shirt off and stomach rolling over his belt to sell their product because no one would want to see that.  The same strategy is used with women.  The media realizes that no women would want to buy a bikini if the girl in the picture is overweight, so they use a perfect-bodied women to advertise it.  This is where adolescents get the image of a perfect body.  Girls know that guys think the women in the advertisements are sexy, and the boys know that girls think the men in the advertisements are sexy.  This is what fuels the fire of teenagers trying to achieve the perfect body that the media portrays.

Another major influence of the media is the portrayal of sex.  The average TV viewer will see about 14,000 references of sex each year, which are some of their leading sources of information about sex and sexuality.  Only a small fraction of that number includes references to safe sex or STDs.  Some studies have shown that repeated exposure to sexual content influence teens to have sex at an earlier age.  One major media corporation that is responsible for exposing teens to sexual content is MTV.  In music videos especially, women are portrayed as a sex objects and send sexual messages to viewers.  Many teens are not mature enough to understand that it is just an act and that women are not actually supposed to be looked at as sex objects.  A perfect example is the music video “Love Sex Magic” by Justin Timberlake and Ciara: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raB8z_tXq7A.  In this video, the women are very sexual and teens that watch this definitely would believe that this is the way women are supposed to dance and act with boys.  Not only do movies and music videos demonstrate the distortion of sexuality, but videos games are now beginning to make women more and more provocative.  For example, In the video game Grand Theft Auto, many of the women in the game are wearing tight and revealing clothes, not to mention you can pick some of them up and pay them to ‘have a good time in the back of your car.’  There are also commercials that demonstrate sexuality, such as Axe commercials or any clothing or fragrance/beauty product commercials.  A perfect example would be an Axe commercial that frequently uses ‘balls’ in reference to a man’s genitals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPwhMoQBg_8.  Amazing enough, this inappropriate commercial made its way to mainstream media.  The balls used in this commercial are referred to as dirty, fuzzy, and other words that could also describe men genitals.  One can only think that youth watching this commercial is going to make sexual jokes in their own lives, which will then progress to even more sexual actions.

A third major influence that the media has on youth is adolescent violence.  Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts.  Adolescents that are exposed to violent media for even a short time period are more likely to be more physically and verbally violent because of new words or actions they have witnessed and want to try for themselves.  Many of the games the teenagers play, movies they watch, or television programs they watch send messages of conflict between the winner and the loser.  This causes the viewers to imitate this in real life.  If one loses, they usually are not too happy which causes problems and fighting between adolescents.  The violence in movies and television also does not realistically depict violence.  In the movies, they will show a fight and will show people getting punched a bunch of times, but the character will emerge with nothing but a little scratch on their face.  Realistically, people are being put into a coma and/or dying from fighting.  In the movies, they don’t show everyone after the brawl in the hospital making sure their head isn’t damaged or fixing their broken jaw and nose.  When kids watch these kind of movies, their idea of violence is completely distorted.  They think they can just punch someone and get into a fight without their being serious consequences.  In today’s society, you can get arrested for fighting, yet in movies when a fight breaks out, the characters rarely are put in jail.  This sends very inaccurate messages to youth.

A last major influence on the youth stems from alcohol and drugs/cigarette exposure.  In a lot of movies, they show teens smoking cigarettes.  For example, in the movie The Outsiders, the gang of kids are shown to be really tough and cool and they smoke cigarettes.  A young kid that sees these tough cool kids smoking cigarettes is obviously going to be tricked into believing that smoking cigarettes is the cool thing to do.  Alcohol is portrayed the same way in movies.  In the movie Superbad, a major portion of the plot is based around getting alcohol for a high school party in order to look cool.  This clearly sends adolescents the message that underage drinking is cool.

The media’s influence on today’s society is very real in that it is clearly shaping teenager.  The media helps them choose what to wear, how to look, what to eat, decide what is sexy and what is normal for sexuality, and what is cool to do illegally.  It depicts violence as a non-significant issue.  I believe that if the media is not soon controlled, our society will be a very violent and sexually provocative one because our youth is being extremely persuaded by its distortions.

Bibliography:
"Media Influence on Youth." Crisis Connection, Inc. Web. 26 Apr. 2011. <http://www.crisisconnectioninc.org/teens/media_influence_on_youth.htm>.

Anderson, Craig A., Leonard Berkowitz, Edward Donnerstein, L. Rowell Huesmann, James D. Johnson, Daniel Linz, Neil M. Malamuth, and Ellen Wartella. "The Influence of Media Violence on Youth." Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4.3 (2003): 81-110. Print.

"Sex, Violence, and Profanity in the Media Fact Sheet, TV Statistics - Parents Television Council." Parents Television Council - Because Our Children Are Watching. Web. 26 Apr. 2011. <http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/facts/mediafacts.asp>.

Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: a New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Print.

"Media Influences on Today's Teens by Edrecovery." IM Faceplate - Brand Yourself! Web. 26 Apr. 2011. <http://www.imfaceplate.com/edrecovery/media-influences-on-todays-teens>.

How the Media Influences Youth

http://www.crisisconnectioninc.org/teens/media_influence_on_youth.htm

In the above site, I discovered a few statistics that I will be able to use in my final blog paper.  This website uses polls from different magazines and other sources that are helpful in backing up my statement that the media does indeed have a big influence on the youth.
Among this website, there are also many different links that bring me to other sites about the same topic, each site with a different background and new statistics and ideas.
I also found a few youtube videoes  that supports the idea that the media affects youth, especially young girls and the way they look: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei6JvK0W60I  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omBfg3UwkYM

'Distracted by Everything' PBS Video

In this video, M.I.T. students are researched in multitasking.  It is a proven statistic that America, especially young adults such as college students, are becoming more and more relient on technology.  During almost every minute of every day, students have some sort of screen in front of them, whether it is a cell phone, iPod, or laptop.  Students find themselves having to multitask while they are doing homework or just lounging around on their laptop.  For example, they could be doing a homework assignment on their laptop while texting on their cell phone.  The student could even get distracted by random curiosities and procrastinate by researching that curiosity with Google or another search engine.
I found this video to be extremely realistic.  Although M.I.T. is a very prestigious school and is known for being a very smart institute, this multitasking does not only happen to them, but to all college students.  Here at Sacred Heart University, I cannot walk to class without seeing at least five people texting on their cell phones.  When they're not texting on their way to class, they are sitting in front of either a laptop or a powerpoint screen in class.  When class is over, they are back in the halls texting again.
Our society today has become very dependent on technology whether it is communicating or teachers lecturing students.  I believe this has caused a decline in communication skills because people rely on technology to communicate more now.  Person-to-person communication is slowly but surely deteriorating.  Technology is also the culprit of procrastination, multitasking, and distraction.