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Media Role Models and the Effect on Children

Decent Essays

Media construct our culture, and the media we use to communicate with one another shapes our perception of reality. Our society is centered on media, it is the most influential factor in constructing our culture, but is it a positive culture? If we examine the effect that media has on children, we can say that it breeds a harmful culture, one that throws values and morals out the window. This is because the media is profit driven and has developed its own code of ethics of "anything-goes". As a result, children are exposed to things that they should not necessarily be exposed to yet and as a result it rushes their mental development and in fact moulds their mentality. This is a scary fact because these children's minds are susceptible …show more content…

Another example we could look at is Britney Spears, young girls who like Britney Spears think that she is ‘cool' and thus they strive to be just like her, and this involves acting like Britney and more importantly buying Britney Spears products such as her clothing. So in conclusion these media personalities are popular among children and idolized by them because they are promoted as being cool and for a child to be cool they must be just like them, which involves buying their products. These media personalities are in essence products themselves that the media bodies try to sell to children on the basis of ‘cool', and once they can be sold to the children as being cool, their entire franchise benefits because their image can create the demand for all products with their likeness.
Now let's look at the effect that these media personalities have on children in the age group 5 and under. We assume that children are safe watching educational programming such as "Blue's Clues", "Dora the explorer" and "Teletubbies", but are they really as safe as we think they are. First off, these types of television shows are educational and do in fact teach young children while keeping them entertained. This can be seen as a positive influence on our kids and these characters as being positive role

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