Impact Of Mass Media On Adolescent Health: ”the Dark Side”
Lazar, 1982). Because adolescents watch about 20 hours of television a week (Nielsen Media Research, 1990) there is serious concern about the impact violent portrayals have on their behavior. Media executives, parents, teachers, and communities cannot dismiss violent programming as pure entertainment because the media have the power to model attitudes and behavior (Considine & Haley, 1992). With more and more adolescents becoming victims of crime as well as committing the crimes (Davies, 1993), the aforementioned groups need to reexamine how they can help combat this growing trend.
STRESS:
Another area of concern is the amount of stress indirectly caused by the mass media (Davies, 1993). Because early adolescence is a stressful period in life (Hamburg, 1974; Elkind, 1986), younger media consumers are more susceptible to additional stress created by the media. Educator Neil Postman (1982) argues that television exposes young viewers to adult knowledge before they are prepared to handle it; television essentially blurs the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Kids who try to imitate behaviors they see on television, e.g., sexual situations, often experience confusion and dejection because they are unable to reproduce the behaviors in the same manner (Chlubna, 1991). In essence, the media messages children receive are pushing them to be adults before it is time (Elkind, 1981). This pressure to act like an adult causes undue stress, which can lead to unnecessary health problems or cause adolescents to cope with stress in ways similar to those portrayed in the media, e.g., drinking, smoking (Davies, 1993).
There have been some changes in the images of girl and women. Indeed, a “new women” has emerged in commercials in recent years. She is generally presented as super girl , who manages to do all the study work, part-time job (with the help of a product, of course, not of her parents or siblings or friends), or as the liberated teen-girl, who owes her independence and self-esteem to the products she uses. These new images do not represent any real progress but rather create a myth of progress, an illusion that reduces complex sociopolitical problems to mundane personal ones among the adolescent girls.
Adolescents are particularly vulnerable because they are new and inexperienced consumers and are the prime targets of many advertisements. They are in the process of learning their values and roles and developing their self-concepts. Most teenagers are sensitive to peer pressure and find it difficult to resist or even question the dominant cultural messages perpetuated and reinforced by the media. Mass communication has made possible a kind of national peer pressure that erodes private and individual values and standards.
The knowledge about Media literacy allows youth to reflect on important life choices and make decisions about their health behaviors. It allows young people to control the influences of media messages, instead of being controlled by them. Media literacy helps children and adolescents gain skills to intelligently navigate the media and filter the hundreds of messages they receive every day. Simply put, media literacy is the ability to “ask questions about what you watch, see and read.” Media literacy can help youth understand how media are developed, the approaches used to increase persuasion, the commercial sources and beneficiaries of advertising, and the ideology of messages contained in commercial and news media. When they recognize how media messages influence them, students can develop the skills they need to carefully reflect on the messages that portray risky lifestyle choices like smoking as glamorous, rebellious, or “cool.”
SUGGESTIVE APPROACH FOR PARENTS, FAMILY & YOUTH:
Parents must be media literate to help children to be media literate
Teachers and parents must become media literate themselves so they can guide the development of media literacy in their students and children.
Familiarize yourself with youth media and culture
Listen to their music, look at the websites they frequent, watch what they are watching on TV, and go to a teen movie once in a while will help parents keep up with the rapidly changing world of youth media and culture and will give them credibility when they talk to kids about media and media literacy. They can also learn a lot about the media from youngsters.
Parents can help children in understanding the TV content
By choosing appropriate programs, magazines, articles, and watching TV with their children, and discussing what they see or read