Introduction: It is easy to tell that our world is flawed. But there are so many causes, so many things that need fixing, so it is hard to focus on one. That is why people often don't help any cause, because they can't choose, how would they know which cause is more important then the other when it comes down to it? I decided to focus on one cause for my piece that I felt passionately disturbed about.
If I could change anything in the world, I would change the affect of technology on media. In our modern society technology dictates our lives. Americans spend five hours a day watching TV on average. That does not include the time that they spend checking Facebook with their phone and their computers while tweeting and instagraming. Media rules our lives and we are influenced by all of it. On average in America children spend 3.5 minutes a week in meaning conversation with their parents and spend 1,680 minutes a week watching TV What has our world come to when our children are more influenced by media and television than the parents who raised them. Every piece of media that Americans consume with current technology tells them that they aren’t good enough.
The girls displayed on TV and magazines are all beautiful, thin, and flawless when in reality these kinds of girls make up only a small portion of the world population and yet these are the only girls ever seen in media. This makes girls feel bad about themselves which leads to eating disorders, depression, and even suicide.
Also through technology people are cyberbullied every day. With the amount of social media available today, cyberbullying has become a huge problem. When people can insult other people from the safety of their computer instead of saying it to their face, they have the courage to say almost anything. Cyberbullying can cause depression and suicide for teens all around the world.
The violence in media today is astounding. When television first came out even the word pregnant was not allowed on the air. Now virtually any word can be said on TV By the age of 18 kids will have seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV alone, not including the violence shown in advertisements in magazines, billboards, news papers, ect. Nearly all video games today are violent wether kids are killing zombies, Nazis, aliens, or more. In video games kids are taught all the different ways guns and knives can be used to kill someone. With the latest technology for the gaming systems such as the Xbox and play station every game is more realistic than ever. Studies have shown that the way violence is represented in the media today desensitizes people to violence and they are more likely to use it forcefully in the real world.
Media today has also become more sexualized than ever before. Advertisements often show men and women with as little clothing as possible to attract people to their product. Almost all soap operas show some form of sexual content and more than half of all the other shows on TV also show sexual content. Studies have shown that this encourages kids to have sex at younger ages. Also for boys the media has encouraged rape because in media all women are portrayed as is sexual objects.
Race is also discriminated against in media, even in Disney movies. In the movie Tarzan, Tarzan is white and so were any other human that came up in the movie, the only black characters were the animals which teaches kids that only white men are really human and that black men are not worthy of being called humans as they are merely animals. This is just one example, in many animated TV shows and movies parents don’t understand that their kids are taught that being white is the superior race.
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