Media and Modern Society

The children of modern society differ on polar opposite scales as compared to children of previous generations. Anything that does not have an on and off switch is considered old fashioned and obsolete. Our society has trained children to surround themselves with electronic devices such as cellphones, MP3 players, gaming consoles and most importantly, television. Television plays a significant role in everyday life since it is more widely available than it was a couple of decades ago. The media is easily accessible through the television, allowing for positive and negative influences to take place. The main problems that parents of today's children face are that the children are becoming less childlike with video games and television taking up majority of their time; they are beginning to gain weight with the influence of junk food commercials and their social skills are beginning to fall by the wayside since they spend excessive amounts of time watching television or playing video games. Regulations on the content of food advertisements should be implemented by broadcasting authorities such as the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), and time restrictions together with critical monitoring of content should be implemented by parents in order to reduce the negative effects of television and video games on the children of modern society.

With the constant reminder of the ubiquitous nature of media in modern society, children are becoming less and less childlike in their behavior and attitude. In Marie Winn's article titled “The End of Play”, she discusses the topic of how children today are losing traits of how we traditionally perceive children to behave and are becoming more like “tired business men”. (Winn, “End of Play” 81...

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...and the inability for a child to function socially all have one common factor that ties them together. They are all negatively influenced by the presence of television and video games. In reality, the wide spectrum of the negative influences that burden television and video games can never be completely eliminated at once, but there are definitely solutions to combat the particular influences that pose as threats to the growing process of the nation's children, especially if they are easily preventable. Restricting and regulating the amount of time allowed to watch television or encouraging a healthy, active lifestyle as opposed to a sedentary lifestyle are such examples of solutions to preventable problems. The children are a very important fundamental to society because they are, after all, the ones who will run our future and generations after the next.