Kids ages eight through 18 spend 44.5 hours per week watching TV, playing video games, IMing, and listening to music...more than the average 17 hours they spend with their parents. Nearly two out of three TV programs contain violence. Sexual content appears in 64 percent of all TV programs. These media facts published by Common Sense Media may surprise you…and it’s because we’ve become numb to the overwhelming amount of media messages thrown our way everyday.Perhaps Postman was right to worry about the future…
Social critic Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, attempting to
call people’s attention to the media they so readily accept without question.
On page 92, Postman says, “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” With television as the most influential media medium in society, he feels that people are no longer actively thinking for themselves. Instead, they rely on the media to tell them what to think and what to do. The problem is, he says, that television is not providing people with an accurate depiction of world; instead, it is trying to entertain, and consequently making a profit in the process.
Although Postman wrote this book back in 1985, his fears do not fall short in today’s world as kids spend more time with the media as Common Sense Media’s figures show. This reality paints a scary picture.
As kids watch more and more television, they start to identify TV programs with reality, thereby creating a “fake sense” of what the real world is like. For example, they may think the world must be a very violent place after watching TV, so they close themselves off and have a hard time trusting other people. Such misconceptions about the real world have a good chance of sticking with them throughout their lives.
According to Postman, who cites an idea found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, “…Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.” If we do not try to understand the motives of the media, we will continue to fall to this unfortunate ruin of remaining misinformed. Television is too entertaining to stop watching it. While I think his outlook on American culture may be extreme and a little bitter, Postman makes a good effort to inspire future generations to take their exposure to the media more seriously in efforts to become more media literate.
