mass media influence on youth essay

Essay On Mass Media

500 words essay on mass media.

All kinds of different tools which come in use to help in distributing and circulating information and entertainment to the public come under the term of mass media. In other words, everything including radio, newspapers , cable, television and theatre are parts of mass media. These tools include exchanging opinions and public involvement. Through essay on mass media, we will go through it in detail.

Introduction to Mass Media

In today’s world, mass media embraces internet , cell phones, electronic mail, computers, pagers and satellites. All these new additions function as transmitting information from a single source to multiple receivers.

In other words, they are interactive and work on the person to person formula. Thus, it revolves around the masses i.e. the people. It is true that radio, television, press and cinema are in the spotlight when we talk about mass media.

Nonetheless, the role of pamphlets, books, magazines, posters, billboards, and more also have equal importance if not less. Moreover, the reach of these tools extends to a huge amount of masses living all over the country.

Television, cinema, radio and press are comparatively expensive forms of media which private financial institutions or the Government runs. These tools centre on the idea of mass production and mass distribution.

Therefore, newspapers, television and radio cater to the needs of the mass audience and accommodates their taste. As a result, it will not always be refined or sophisticated. In other words, it displays popular culture.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The Function of Mass Media

The main function of mass media is to reach out to the masses and provide them with information. In addition to that, it also operates to analyze and observe our surroundings and provide information in the form of news accordingly.

As a result, the masses get constantly updated about not just their own surroundings but also around the world. This way mass media spreads and interprets information. For instance, weather forecasts equip people and farmers to plan ahead.

Similarly, fishermen get updates about the tidal activities from the news. In addition to this, mass media also strives to keep the fabric of our social heritage intact which showcasing our customs, myths and civilization.

Another major product of mass media is advertising. This way people learn about the goods and services in the market. It also spreads social awareness. For instance, anti-smoking campaign, women empowerment, green earth clean earth and more.

Most importantly, with the numerous mediums available in multiple languages, the masses get entertainment in their own language easily. Millions of people get to access a cheap source of relaxation and pass their time. In fact, it also helps to transport momentarily from our ordinary lives to a dream world. Thus, it remains the undisputed leader in reaching out to the masses.

Conclusion of Essay on Mass Media

All in all, while it is an effective tool, we must also keep a check on its consumption. In other words, it has the power to create and destroy. Nonetheless, it is a medium which can bring about a change in the masses. Thus, everyone must utilize and consume it properly.

FAQ on Essay on Mass Media

Question 1: Why is mass media important?

Answer 1: Mass media is essential as it informs, educates and entertains the public. Moreover, it also influences the way we look at the world. In other words, it helps in organizing public opinion.

Question 2: How does mass media affect our lives?

Answer 2: Mass media affects many aspects of human life, which range from the way we vote to our individual views and beliefs. Most importantly, it also helps in debunking false information.

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Article contents

Youth and media culture.

Stuart R. Poyntz Stuart R. Poyntz Simon Fraser University
and Jennesia Pedri Jennesia Pedri Simon Fraser University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.75
Published online: 24 January 2018

Media in the 21st century are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality; but youth, media culture, and learning nevertheless remain entangled in a rich set of relationships today. These relationships and the anxieties they produce are not new; they echo worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have been around for decades.

These anxieties first appeared in response to the fear that violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture was thought to pose to culture. Others, however, believed that media could be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift thinking about youth, media culture, and education. For example, it shaped the development of television shows such as Sesame Street as a kind of learning portal. In addition to the idea that youth can learn from the media, educators and activists have also turned to media education as a more direct intervention. Media education addresses how various media operate in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences in an effort to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. These developments have been enhanced by a growing interest in a broad project of literacy. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading texts. This was enabled by the emergence of new digital media technologies that prioritize user participation.

As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems have arisen that affect how media cultures are understood in relation to learning. Among these issues is how a participatory turn in media culture allows others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. Critical media literacy education addresses this context and continues to provide a framework to address the future of youth, media culture and learning.

media culture
media literacy
consumer culture

Introduction

It would be absurd for teenagers today to forgo the Internet as a resource for schoolwork and learning experiences of all sorts. Whether to research an essay, acquire new skills, find an expert, watch a video clip, or contribute a blog post, the Internet is often the first source that students turn to pick up new information, to access useful networks, or to find resources that they need to accomplish whatever it is they want to learn. And why wouldn’t it be? The Internet is now a digital learning economy populated by YouTube and Vimeo channels, social media sites like Wikipedia, software and learning games, library data archives, learning television shows, documentaries, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and assorted other resources that are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality (Bakan, 2011 ; Louv, 2008 ), but today’s youth, media culture, and learning are nevertheless entangled in a rich set of relationships.

These relationships and the anxieties that they produce are not new. Since the earliest decades of the 20th century , learning dynamics have been thought to be integral to the way youth and media cultures weave together. But these relationships are vexed; the connections among youth lives, media, and education are sites of tremendous anxiety and concern around the world. Yet learning is now such a profoundly mediated experience that traditional dichotomies separating education and entertainment, work and leisure, expert and nonexpert, and pedagogy and everyday life are no longer helpful.

In this article, we examine this context and address how relations among youth, media culture, and learning have been understood since the turn of the last century. Our story begins in the Anglo-American world, but it has quickly become global as media and youth cultures expand around the world. We highlight the anxieties and panics common to thinking about media in young people’s lives and indicate where and how the mediation of youth learning has been taken up to support progressive ends through the development of novel resources, institutions, and pedagogies that nurture young people’s agency, identities, and citizenship. Our survey examines how specific media forms, including film, television, and Web design, have been calibrated to support young people’s learning through the media, and the development of media literacy education to promote critical learning about the media. To conclude, we detail three major problematics that continue to shape the relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Teen Screens

Teenagers graduating from high school in 2017 across the global North and much of the global South have always known smart mobile devices, social media, and YouTube, near-constant data surveillance, the ability to Google facts as needed, and texting, messaging, and posting as part of the regular rhythms of daily life. While many statistics have been collected over the years about the time that adolescents spend immersed in media, the general impression is that most children and youth are more involved than ever with media technologies and content. A new area of children’s and youth media has emerged in recent years. It is a world where the Internet, mobile devices, and “television,” now consumed across multiple platforms, compete for attention alongside older media (i.e., radio, appointment television, and movies). Various studies conducted in recent years have sought to understand these developments, with particular attention given to investigating the role of the Internet, social media, smartphones, and mobile technologies in young people’s lives. Regular television and radio continue to hold a place among teenagers’ media choices, and along with mobile phones, they are part of a primary youth media ecology in the global North and South (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ).

Today, however, one can no longer assume that television programming is viewed on a television set via regularly scheduled broadcasting. While watching television continues to make up a significant portion of teens’ overall media usage in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Caron et al., 2012 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ), smart TVs, on-demand services, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and video-streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix, and Baidu have redefined what it means to “watch television.” Because the options for consuming content now exist simultaneously across many platforms, there is also a significant amount of diversity in young people’s preferences and patterns of use. Music, for example, remains the most preferred medium among teens, but among only about one-third of teens (30%). After music, video games are a favorite among 15%, reading among 10%, social media among 10%, and television among 9%. The fragmenting of tastes and preferences is notable, with no single medium standing out above all. Added to this is the diversity of ways that teens can engage in these activities, as well as differences in relation to class, gender, and race/ethnicity (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The point to be made is that changes in how young people spend time with the media are taking place as part of longer-term trends in how media is knit into adolescents’ lives.

At the center of this trend is the fact that young people simply have more media options—both in terms of the media technology used and the content available—and these options are tightly wedded to the daily lives of children and youth. For instance, 57% of teens in the United States have a television set in their bedroom, 47% have a laptop computer, 37% have a tablet, and 31% have a portable game player (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). Sonia Livingstone ( 2009 , p. 21) identifies these technologies with “screen-rich ‘bedroom cultures,’” which have become the norm for kids in countries across the global North. Adding to and fostering media use in screen-rich bedroom cultures is the fact that two-thirds of teens (67%) now own their own smartphone, on which they talk and text, access social media (40%), and listen to music in daily patterns and rhythms (Common Sense Media, 2015 ).

With all these media options available, it is not surprising that teens are more likely than in the past to be media multitaskers, able to pack more media into an hour of consumption than was possible in previous generations. Young people in the United States spend approximately nine hours a day consuming media, for example, but they consume more than one medium at a time. In fact, 50% of teens say that they watch television while doing homework, and 51% say that they use social media some of or all the time when they do homework (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The typical teenage user today is someone doing homework while watching Netflix, listening to music, and responding to the occasional text, Snapchat, or Instagram message. In this way, screens do not go away as much as they have become environmental in youths’ lives.

This story casts a pall over contemporary youth cultures for some. It is as though the media machine is never absent from youths’ time and space. It is attached to and formative of the worlds of young people, and it would appear to allow for no distance or time away from screens and representations in everyday life. Concerns of this sort are not new. They echo panicked worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have existed for decades. To make sense of these worries, it is helpful to begin with the history of youth and youth culture, terms which are not exclusive to, but find an early emergence in, the West.

Youth as a Distinct Life Stage

The concept of youth can feel as though it has been with us for centuries. But while the age of transition between childhood and adulthood exists across societies, the idea that this period is associated with a particular group of people—youth—and the cultures that they partake in is a recent phenomenon. Andy Bennett (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004 ) tells us that historical instances of what we now call “youth culture” can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries to a group of London apprentices whose dress, drinking, and riotous conduct set them apart from others. Early youth cultures can also be linked to stylistically distinct groups of young workers in northern England in the late 19th century , and to what Timothy Gilfoyle ( 2004 , p. 870) calls the “street rats and gutter snipes” of New York City, who developed oppositional subcultures to challenge adult authority from the mid- 19th century onward. But it wasn’t until the turn of the last century that a modern notion of youth took hold. Schooling would be key to this development.

Publicly funded or supported schooling on a mass scale was regularized in the United Kingdom by the late 19th century and had been ongoing in the United States in the post–Civil War period (i.e., after 1860–1865 ). Public schools developed around the same time in French and English Canada, and slightly later ( 1880 ) in Australia. The practice of batching students into groups by age contributed to the emergence of a new subject position linked to the teen years. If schools started this process, worries about delinquency served to consolidate the notion of youth as a stage of development. Juvenile crime in particular, initially considered primarily an affliction of poor and working-class youth, became generalized by the 1890s as juvenile delinquency and applied to all youth (Gillis, 1974 ). The fear of rising crime rates led to legislative action and the expansion of welfare provisions in the United Kingdom and the United States. The resulting system of social services addressed adolescents as a particular age cohort with specific interests and needs (Osgerby, 2004 ).

By the early 20th century , in psychology and pedagogy studies, G. Stanley Hall’s seminal text, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Education (Hall, 1904 ) addressed this stage of life as a specific period of development associated with tumult and uncertainty—the sturm and drang of adolescence. Thinking of adolescence in these terms reflected the worries of legislators, educators, and reformers, but it was not until the early 1940s that the notion of youth culture was coined by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons ( 1942 ). Parsons used the phrase youth culture to name a specific generational cohort experiencing distinct processes of socialization that set them apart from others. Fears about young people’s maladjustment to war during the 1940s continued to feed worries about youth delinquency (Gilbert, 1986 ). But more significantly, a series of changes in the social, economic, and cultural lives of adolescents that began prior to World War II and consolidated during the postwar years proved essential to marking out a modern notion of youth culture.

Media and consumer markets were integral to these changes. From the start of the 20th century , mass media were among the key developments shaping youth culture and learning. This was evident in the United Kingdom and the United States, where industrialization and mass consumer markets emerged earlier than in other nations. This reveals something about the characteristics of youth culture; in many ways, youth cultures (dance, music, fashion, sports, etc.) have always been mediated and shaped by the effects of mass production, wage labor relations, and urban experience. In this way, youth and modernity are tightly connected. Modernity is linked to experiences of change driven by urbanization and migration, the expansion of mass, factory-based production, and the proliferation of images and consumerism as normative conditions of everyday life. Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries , youth have been harbingers of these developments and have often been considered the archetypical subject of modernity.

Early Mass Media and Youth Audiences

The tendency to link youth with the changes characterized by modernity has produced a history of anxieties where the relationships among youth, media culture, and education are concerned. These anxieties first appeared in response to the violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture (e.g., penny novels and mass sporting events, like Major League Baseball), which many educators thought posed an imminent threat to culture. The emergence of the cinema at the turn of the 20th century epitomized these fears by forever changing the nature of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Movies can be understood with little tuition, meaning that they can fix the attention of all age groups on the screen, a development that proved particularly attractive to children. Early cinematographers were able to stage dramas on a scale unheard of in live theater, to command an audience much greater than literature could, and hence to shape the popular imagination as never before. But because movies work through the language of images, they were thought to create highly emotional—and intellectually deceitful—effects. Images were thought to leave audiences (particularly young people) in something like a trance, a state of passivity that left adolescents open to forms of manipulation that were morally suspect and politically dangerous.

These fears were common, and yet for some, the very fact that movies could reach larger and more diverse audiences—including women and the working class—meant that the medium held a promise for learning that couldn’t be ignored. Such responses not only reflected the sentiment of early film boosters, but they also were part of a more nuanced sense of how life—including the experience of learning—was changing in the 20th century . In a remarkable series of essays, Walter Benjamin ( 1969 , 1970 ) argued thus, suggesting that movies could widen audiences’ horizons through the unique technology of the shot, the power of editing, and sound design. These tools allowed people to see and experience distant lands, other times, and new and fantastical experiences in live-action and highly structured narrative formats. Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush ( 1925 ), MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld ( 1936 ), and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz ( 1939 ) exemplified film’s early appeal because they seemed capable of helping people to dream and escape vicariously from everyday experiences to imagine a different (and perhaps better) world.

Not surprisingly, Benjamin’s was a minority view in the mid- 20th century . Far more common were fears that modern media would serve to undermine how young people learn proper culture—meaning good books and the right music and stories thought to foster a vibrant and meaningful cultural life. Benjamin’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School (so-called for the city where their work began), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were especially influential in this regard. Drawing from their experiences with the role that media (i.e., radio and film) played in the rise of fascism in Germany, as well as their disappointment with the quality of early popular music and Hollywood movies, Adorno and Horkheimer ( 1972 ) argued that the culture industries (the artifacts and experiences produced by the corporations who sold or transmitted film, popular music, magazines, and radio) threatened to undermine rich and autonomous forms of cultural life. They meant that movies, advertisements, and eventually television were signs of the commodification of culture, an indication that culture itself—epitomized by the rich European traditions of classical music, painting, and literature—was being reduced to a sellable thing, a commodity just like any other in capitalist societies.

In this context, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that culture no longer works to promote critical and autonomous thought; rather, the culture industries promote sameness, a uniformity of experience and a standardization of life that at best serve to distract people from significant issues of the day. Through childish illusion and fantasy, the culture industries produce false consciousness, a form of thinking that misinterprets the real issues that matter in our lives, leaving young people and adults blissfully unaware of key issues of common concern that demand our attention and action. For those suspicious of these observations, they are worth considering in light of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States in 2016 . Since the election, it has become clear that distraction (by “fake news,” for instance) and illusion (facilitated at least in part by foreign manipulation of social media) played a vital role in the campaign and Trump’s eventual election.

Youth Markets and Media Panics

The concerns of the Frankfurt School found a receptive audience in the second half of the 20th century . The postwar decades mark an especially significant period of expansion in youth markets and youth culture in the West (Osgerby, 2004 ). Increasing birth rates during the postwar baby boom fueled the expansion of youth markets, as did the extension of mass schooling, which “accentuated youth as a generational cohort” (Osgerby, 2004 , p. 16). Complicating this were the emergence of television and an intensely organized effort to shape and calibrate the spending power of young people in the service of conspicuous consumer consumption.

First introduced to the general public at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, in the postwar years, television became a new kind of hearth around which parents and children would gather. In the United States, television was initially thought potentially promising for children’s education. The small screen represented the promise and possibility of modern times. Not surprisingly, this sentiment was short lived (Goldfarb, 2002 ). By the late 1950s and 1960s, it became apparent that “most children’s programming was produced with the size of the audience rather than children’s education in mind. [As a result,] television [became] the source of anxious discourses about mesmerized children entranced by mindless cartoons, punctuated by messages from paying sponsors” (Kline, Stewart, & Murphy, 2006 , p. 132; also see Kline, 1993 ). These worries aligned with increasing concerns about the dangerous and morally compromising influence of rock ‘n’ roll, popular magazines, early celebrities, and movies in youths’ lives, and what resulted was a media panic that harkened back to the earliest days of mass media.

Most often characterized by exaggerated claims about the impact of popular commercial culture on children and youth, media panics are a special kind of moral frenzy over the influence of media on vulnerable populations (Drotner, 1999 ). Stanley Cohen’s groundbreaking study of the mods and rockers, Folk Devils and Moral Panics , suggests that emerging youth cultures became the most recurrent type of moral panic in Britain after World War II (Cohen, 1972 ). He reveals how youth are positioned in postwar industrial societies as a source of fear and often misplaced anxiety. His study has been criticized for simplifying the meaning of the term moral panics and for underestimating how complex media environments can shape them (McRobbie & Thornton, 1995 ); nonetheless, his work draws attention to the ways that overwrought fears of youth and media culture can come to act as stand-ins for larger social anxieties. In the process, youth and youth culture become scapegoats. Media panics don’t offer helpful tools for explaining social change, in other words, as much as they distract parents, educators, and others from making sense of the formative conditions shaping young lives.

Media panics continued to appear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In the United Kingdom, for instance, media panics arose around “video nasties” and the risks that horror films and sexually explicit material were thought to pose for youth (Oswell, 2002 ). Related concerns arose in the 1990s regarding video games and violence, the presence of dangerous and disturbing messages buried in the lyrics of popular music, and fears about fantasy board games, including Dungeons and Dragons . More recently, anxieties have come to the fore having to do with the role of the Internet and social media in young people’s lives, including fears of “stranger danger,” cyberbullying, and the likelihood that teenagers are sharing explicit images of themselves and others online (i.e., “sexting”).

We note these fears not to dismiss them outright, but to draw attention to the history of anxieties that have characterized worries about youth and media culture. Such concerns are often underpinned by the view that young people are vulnerable and highly impressionable persons unable to manage the impact of media in their lives. Indeed, the wariness of public officials, parents, health practitioners, and educators toward media is still today often underpinned by deeper commitments to a sense that youth is a time of innocence and hope. Whether understood biologically as a period of maturation toward adulthood or as a distinct generational cohort characterized by shared processes of socialization, adolescence has long been a repository for both the greatest hopes and fears of a nation. While youth are often considered a risk to society and the reproduction of social order, they also have long been framed in connection with the future health and well-being of nations. The result is that youth often occupy a contradictory space in relation to media culture (Drotner, 1999 ).

On the one hand, popular media culture has been a vital resource through which youth communities, subcultures, and generations have defined themselves, their desires, and their hopes and dreams for decades. This continues to be reflected in the dynamic ways that youth are using and creating digital media to shape their lives and address matters of common concern in societies around the world. We take up these developments in more detail later in this article.

On the other hand, it is evident that consumerism and commercial media culture remain sources of tremendous anxiety. The media content that teenagers access—beyond the watchful eye of guardians and educators—and the way that they learn about gender, race, sexuality, the environment, and other issues continues to raise alarms. From at least the 1980s onward, the quantity of media culture has expanded around the world, meaning that more advertising, more commercial screens, more branded experiences of play, and more intensive systems of corporate surveillance and tracking have become common features of youths’ lives.

The digitization of media and the emergence of more dynamic, participatory media cultures (Jenkins, 2006 ) are crucial to this development, as we explain in the final section. But changes in media concentration and the development of vast media conglomerates—including Google, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Baidu, and News Corp—that produce media commodities and experiences for various national markets have been instrumental in shaping the tensions and impact of media culture on youth lives. It is just these sorts of developments that have long raised the concerns of educators and others who remain deeply ambivalent about the relationship between consumer media and young people. The consequence of this ambivalence has led some educators to argue that media, including film, television, and the Internet, can have a broader educational impact, particularly given their ability to reach large audiences. In the following sections, we take up this possibility and address how learning media and media education have been developed to create forms of public pedagogy with the potential to enrich young people’s learning.

The Media as Learning Portal

While the ties between consumer culture and media continue to raise worries, television’s reach and increasingly central role in families have drawn the attention of educators who argue that it can be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift the thinking about youth, media culture, and education. Educational media programming was not a new idea in the decade so much as it extended and contributed to an older tradition of using stories and folk tales to teach moral lessons to children (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ). What was different in the 1960s (and today), however, is that this work wasn’t (and isn’t) being undertaken around the local hearth; it was (and is) developing through the conventions, institutions, and practices of a highly complex media system.

Using this media system to create successful learning resources has been a delicate business. The idea of using radio and documentary movies as informational (and often didactic) educational tools to teach kids social studies, geography, and history has a long tradition in national schooling systems. More dynamic forms of educational programming came online in the late 1960s, led by a then-remarkable new program called Sesame Street that came to epitomize these developments.

Created by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1969 as part of the so-called American war on poverty (Spring, 2009 ), Sesame Street helped launch the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States as a counterweight to the influence of commercial programming in the American mediasphere. Originated by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, Sesame Street drew lessons from early children’s television programming in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom (Coulter, 2016 ) and set out to promote peaceful multicultural societies and to provide inner-city kids with a head start in developing literacy and numeracy skills. To do this, the now well-known strategy was to adapt conventions of commercial media—muppets, music, animation, live-action film, special effects, and visits from celebrities—to deliver mass literacy to home audiences.

By the late 1990s, approximately 40% of all American children aged 2–5 watched Sesame Street weekly. From the 2000s onward, the reach of Sesame Street became global, extending to 120 countries and including many foreign-language adaptations developed with local educators in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Palestine, Russia, South Africa, and many other places (Spring, 2009 ). With global audiences, the show’s storylines and issues addressed have also changed. Sesame Street is now engaged in raising awareness and understanding about a host of global issues. For instance, in the South African coproduction, a muppet named Kami who is HIV-positive was introduced in response to the large numbers of South African children who are HIV-positive. Through Kami and related stories, the goal of the program is “to create tolerance of HIV-positive children and disseminate information about the disease” across South Africa” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80). Meanwhile in Bangladesh, the local version of Sesame Street has been used to promote “equality between social classes, genders, castes, and religions” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80).

This success led to the development of other CTW educational programs, including The Electric Company , 3-2-1 Contact , and Square One TV . A conviction that electronic and digital media can support progressive educational goals has also fueled the development of a learning media industry over the past two decades. We are in fact witnessing a veritable explosion of educational media, including an array of educational learning software ( Math Blaster , JumpStart , Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego , etc.) designed to improve older students’ competencies (Ito, 2008 ). Some of this media may be useful, but evidence about the learning value of many of these programs remains scant (Barbaro, 2008 ). On the other hand, at least three other forms of educational media have continued to develop, and in ways that can be beneficial to youth learning. They include public service announcements (PSAs), entertainment education, and cultural jamming.

Public Service Announcements

Public service announcements (PSAs) are now ubiquitous. They can be seen in schools, on television, online, and at commercial film screenings. They address issues ranging from the dangers of smoking, alcohol, and drugs, to concerns about youth driving habits, bullying in schools, what children are eating, and a host of other media-related social causes and health crises. At root, the strategy with PSAs isn’t altogether different from that of learning-oriented programs like Sesame Street . While the broad research and learning agenda that informs Sesame Street isn’t often replicated with PSAs, the idea that commercial media language can be repurposed to influence behavior is common to both formats.

PSAs use the language of advertising—quick, emotional, and sometimes funny messages that emphasize hard-hitting lessons—and the practices of branding to alter behavior or encourage youth to get involved with issues shaping their lives. Studies suggest these strategies can be remarkably effective for influencing young people’s behavior (Montgomery, 2007 , 2008 ; Wakefield, Flay, Nichter, & Giovino, 2003 ; Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; DeJong & Winston, 1990 ). Wakefield et al. ( 2003 ) for instance, review a number of studies that show antismoking PSAs are useful tools for changing kids’ attitudes, especially when combined with school support programs that help youth to quit or avoid smoking.

These successes are important, of course, because they attest to the ways that learning through media can be nurtured in creative, dynamic, and effective ways, even in a time when media saturation is common in youth lives. A cautionary note is nonetheless in order. PSAs have become so common today that companies are using PSA-like formats to promote everything from cars to personal care products. The personal health products company, Unilever Inc., for instance, has been especially successful with their Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty.” Cutting across online platforms as well as television and film, the campaign has foregrounded the way that beauty ads create unrealistic notions about women’s body images. This is an important message, to be sure; however, while this campaign was underway, Unilever launched an equally provocative campaign for AXE body products for men. What stood out in the latter campaign was precisely the opposite message about women’s body images; AXE ads in fact seemed to suggest that women matter only when their appearance corresponds to a rather tired and old set of stereotypes. This doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, but it does suggest that the value of PSAs (particularly when developed as singular learning resources) may be waning as this style of communication becomes just one more strategy for channeling commercial messages to youth.

Entertainment Education

Another strategy, often called entertainment education , has a similarly long history in both the global North and South (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; Tufte, 2004 ). Distinct from the more explicit focus of learning TV and PSA campaigns, this strategy takes advantage of the fact that it has been clear for some time that youth negotiate their identities and values through popular media representations and celebrity identifications. Because of this, educators and youth activists have turned to network programming (e.g., Dawson’s Creek , MTV’s Real People , and Glee ), as well as teen magazines (e.g., Teen People and Seventeen ) as vehicles for developing storylines and articles that address issues in youth’s lives. Similar practices are evident around the world. In India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa, for instance, popular television formats like soap operas and youth dramas (e.g., Soul City and Soul Brothers in South Africa) have been used to raise awareness and change unhealthy behaviors related to a host of issues, including child poverty, community health, HIV-AIDS, and gun violence.

In a related vein, the Kaiser Foundation in the United States has been influential in the development of a multinational set of entertainment education programs on HIV-AIDS in partnership with the United Nations. Since 2004 , the Kaiser Foundation has partnered with the United Nations, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Russia’s Gazprom-Media, Rupert Murdoch’s Star Group Ltd. in India, and more than 10 other media companies to develop a Global AIDS initiative. This eventually led to the integration of HIV-AIDS messages into various programs watched by young people, including a reality series in India modeled on American Idol , called Indian Idol (Montgomery, 2007 ). Similarly, series like the Degrassi franchise in Canada and the United States have addressed issues such as family violence, school shootings, mental illness, and questions about sexuality (Byers, 2008 ). Other series, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer , have ventured into similar territory, and while many educators are perhaps wary of the close working partnership between commercial broadcasters and producers in entertainment education, others note that the very success of this kind of programming demonstrates that media culture can be more than entertainment; it can be a form of meaningful pedagogy that helps young people engage in real social, cultural, and political debate.

Culture Jamming

Fomenting social, cultural, and political debate has been the objective of a third strategy used by educators and progressives concerned about youth, media culture, and education. Culture jamming draws on a long tradition of using media techniques with satire and parody “to draw attention to what may otherwise go unnoticed” in society (Meikle, 2007 , p. 168). Antecedents to culture jamming include the anti-Nazi dada posters of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) and the détournment tactics of the Situationist Movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s, which sought to dismantle the world of commercial media culture that transforms “[e]verything that [is] directly lived . . . into a representation” (Debord, 1994 , p. 1).

Culture jammers frequently argue that our lives are dominated by a vast electronic and digital field of multimodal texts (images, audio, and now hypertext and hyperlinks), and the only way to respond is to use the design methods (pastiche, bricolage, parody, and montage) and genres (advertising, journalism, and filmmaking) that characterize commercial media to challenge media power and taken-for-granted assumptions within contemporary culture (Kenway & Bullen, 2008 ). Mark Dery ( 1993 , p. 1) calls this a form of “semiological guerrilla warfare,” through which culture jammers fight the status quo by using the principles of media culture to upend the meanings and assumptions operating in this culture.

Perhaps the most common and popular form of culture jamming is the sub-vertisement that groups like Adbusters have made popular. Sub-vertisements use popular references and techniques in branding campaigns to turn the meaning of logos, branded characters, and signs (like the Absolut Vodka bottle) on their heads. (See http://adbusters.org/spoofads/index.php for a gallery of examples that target fast food culture, alcohol and fashion ads, and political communication.) Other groups, including the Yes Men , have developed another culture-jamming strategy based around highly elaborate spoofs of websites, media interviews, and public corporate communications. Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping is yet another example of culture jamming. Reverend Billy and his allies use impromptu, guerrilla theater tactics to raise awareness of the deleterious effects of consumerism (i.e., sweat shop labor, debt, climate degradation, etc.) in society. The idea behind this and similar work is to use fun yet subversive tactics to offer radical commentary about common images, brands, and ideas that circulate in our lives. These learning practices are open to all, of course, but they have been especially relevant among educators eager to address critical issues about youth media culture.

Media Education and Direct Interventions in Youth Learning

Learning media aims to educate people through various media forms, and while this continues to be a popular strategy, for more than 80 years educators and activists have also turned to more direct interventions to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. Media literacy education addresses how media operates in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences. In its early development, media education tended to position schools and teachers as the defenders of traditional culture and impressionable youths. Early relationships among youths, media cultures, and education were framed around a reactionary stance that implored educators to protect youth from the media. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson ( 1933 ) were the first to champion this protectionist phase of media education in their book Culture and Environment , which is credited as the first set of proposals for systematic teaching about mass media in schools. Leavis and Thompson’s work includes a strong prejudice against American popular culture and mass media in general and reflects the aspirations for early media education within schools to inoculate young people against media messages to protect literary (i.e., high) culture from the commoditization lamented by mass culture theorists (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 ).

These sentiments remained strong into the early 1960s, but much as learning media took a new and compelling turn in this decade, so too did media education. Fueling this trend was the belief that educators could adapt curricula and teaching practices to the increasing role of commercial television and movies in young people’s lives. In the United Kingdom, this sentiment led educators to develop a screen education movement based around the critical use of movies in classrooms. Drawing from the influential work of Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy ( 1957 ) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society ( 1958 ), the purpose of screen education was to study the popular media that teenagers were watching so that they would be in a better position to understand their own situation in the world, including the causes of their alienation and marginalization.

A similar desire to help youth see connections between school and everyday life motivated early initiatives in media education in Australia and Canada. Pedagogically, this led to the development of film analysis and film production courses, which drew inspiration from cultural shifts in the way that movies were understood. No longer seen simply as forms of entertainment, film education focused on the way that popular Hollywood movies (e.g., Easy Rider and Medium Cool in 1969 ) reflected social and cultural values and were thus thought deserving of critical attention. This meant teaching students to understand the language of cinema and the ways that movies engage and shape prospects for social and political change.

As an outgrowth of this work, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the first sustained period of institutionalization of media education. Key curricular documents were produced, and media education entered the school curricula in many countries in a formal way for the first time. The Canadian province of Ontario led the way, mandating the teaching of media literacy in the high school English curriculum in 1987 . Eventually K–12 students across Canada would receive some form of media education by the end of the 1990s. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, the late 1980s witnessed the integration of media education into the curriculum as an examinable subject for students pursuing university entrance. This helped to fuel the popularity of courses in media studies, film studies, and communication studies in schools, and by the 1990s and 2000s, additional intermediate courses in media studies were added to the curriculum.

In Australia, the late 1980s and 1990s marked a period of expansion in school-based production and media education training, in part because such training was seen to be an ideal way to equip young people with the technical skills and competencies needed to compete in a globally competitive, highly mediated world (Edith, 2003 ; McMahon & Edith, 1999 ). Similarly, in various non-English-speaking countries, including Norway, Sweden, and Finland, media literacy developed and expanded throughout the 1990s (Tufte, 1999 ).

Even when not included in the formal curriculum, media education became a pedagogical practice of teachers aware of the impact of the media in the lives of their students. In particular, in those countries in the global South where the broader educational needs of the society were still focused on getting children to school and teaching basic literacy and numeracy, media education may not have emerged in the mandated curriculum, but teachers were drawing on media education strategies to help youth make sense of and affect their worlds.

In the United States, school-based media education initiatives were slower to get off the ground. In 1978 , in response to children’s increasing television consumption, the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) convinced the U.S. Office of Education to launch a research and development initiative on the effects of commercial television on young people. In short order, this initiative led the Office of Education to recommend a national curriculum to enhance students’ understanding of commercials, their ability to distinguish fact from fiction, the recognition of competing points of view in programs, an understanding of the style and formats in public affairs programming, and the ability to understand the relationship between television and printed materials (Kline et al., 2006 ).

Ultimately, attempts to implement this curriculum were hampered in the early 1980s as President Ronald Reagan’s move to deregulate the communications industry challenged efforts to develop media education in U.S. schools. Nonetheless, these early developments proved crucial in establishing the ground from which more recent media education initiatives have grown. Robert Kubey ( 2003 ) noted that as of 2000 , all 50 states included some education about the media in core curricular areas such as English, social studies, history, civics, health, and consumer education.

Beyond schools, a number of key nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have developed over the past two decades and have promoted dynamic forms of media education. The Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), a national membership organization chartered in 2001 to organize and host the National Media Education Conference every two years and to promote professional development, is of particular note. So too are the Media Education Foundation (MEF), which produces some of the most important media education resources in North America, and the Centre for Media Literacy (CML), which offers a helpful MediaLit Kit to promote teaching and learning in a media age.

Literacy and Production

While often led by educators, parents, and young people, these developments in media education have been enhanced by interest in a broad project of literacy. The role and discussion of literacy discourse in media education go back to at least the early 1970s in the United States (Kline et al., 2006 ). As media education has internationalized, however, there has been a tendency to turn to literacy metaphors to conceptualize the kinds of media learning enabled through media education. As media education has increasingly become part of school curricula, the language of literacies also has been a familiar and useful framework to situate classroom (and out-of-school) practices. The New London Group’s ( 1996 ) “pedagaogy of multiple literacies” has been especially influential, offering a framework to address the diverse modalities of literacy (thus, multiple literacies) in complex media cultures, alongside a focus on the design and development of critical media education curricula.

While the New London Group’s work has helped to support the development of media literacy education in an era of multimodal texts, the arrival of the personal computer and the emergence of the Internet have been accompanied by the proliferation of a whole host of digital media technologies (e.g., cameras, visual and audio editing systems, distribution platforms, etc.), encouraging the integration of youth media production into the work of media education. Media production has an impressive history in the field of media literacy education going back to at least the 1960s, when experiments with 16-mm film production in community groups and schools were part of early film education initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other countries. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading media texts. Newly accessible broadcasting (or narrowcasting) opportunities made available through Web 2.0 platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, wiki spaces, etc.) accelerated these developments, encouraging the growth of information training programs in schools that focus on Web design, software training, and mastering camera skills in ways that emphasize technological mastery as an end in itself.

The turn to information training is perhaps not surprising, but while technical skills training can help young people to learn key competencies that may lead to job prospects, technical training on its own misrepresents the critical and civic concerns that have long animated media literacy education. How the civic and political involvement of youth are emerging inside highly engaging digital media cultures is one of three major issues examined in the next and final section of this article, where we address pressing questions about contemporary relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Contemporary Issues in Youth Media Culture and Education

Recent questions about youth and media culture are tangled up with the participatory condition common to network societies (Sterne, Coleman, Ross, Barney, & Tembeck, 2016 ; Castells, 1996 ). The age of mass media was preoccupied with problems of representation, atomization, homogenization, and manipulation, and these problems defined the thinking about youth consumption and commercial culture in much of the 20th century . This is reflected in the anxieties and studies noted earlier in this article. As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems has arisen (Chun, 2016 ). Among these is the new role of participation and a participatory turn in media culture that has enabled users (or those we used to call audiences ) to become more active and involved with brands, franchises, celebrities, technologies, and social media networks across everyday life (Jenkins, 2006 ). This turn is evidenced by the increasing amount of time that youth spend with screens, but it is also a function of the way that many of us now interact with media culture. Audiences have always been actively involved with still and moving images, celebrities, sports, and popular music, among other artifacts. Fan cultures exemplify this, as do studies of how real-life audiences talk about and use media (Buckingham, 1993 ; Williams, 2003 ; Silverstone, 2001 ; Scannell, 1989 ; Radway, 1984 ).

But today we are called on to participate in digital media culture in new ways. Participation has become a condition that is “both environmental (a state of affairs) and normative (a binding principle of right action)” (p. vii), and our digital technologies and highly concentrated media industries are woven into the fabric of this state of affairs (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. vii). “These media allow a growing number of people to access, modify, store, circulate, and share media content” in ways that have been available only to professionals or a select few in the past (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. viii). As digitalization has changed the nature of media production, we have not only become more involved and active in our media use, but our interaction with digital media has allowed others to interact with us in new and sometimes troubling ways. This is the paradox of the participatory condition, and it shapes how youth media culture and education are connected today.

Issue 1: Surveillance, Branding, and the Production of Youth

To begin with, the pointy end of the participatory paradox has to do with the way that digital media cultures allow others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. With our data footprint, states, political parties, media, toy, and technology companies (as well as health, insurance, and a host of other industries) become data aggregation units that map and monitor youth behavior to interact with, brand, and modify this behavior for profitable ends. Big data enables the production of complex algorithms that produce what Wendy Chun ( 2016 , p. 363) calls “a universe of dramas” that dominate our attention economies. These dramas (the stories, celebrities, associations, and products with which we interact) are “co-produced transnationally by corporations and states through intertwining databases of action and unique identifiers.” Databases and identifiers enable algorithms to target, engage, and integrate a diverse range of youth into the global imaginary of consumer celebrity cultures and the archives of surveillance states (Chun, 2016 ). The American former military contractor and dissident Edward Snowden draws our attention to this universe in the documentary CitizenFour , which tells his story, and makes clear that instead of governments and corporations being accountable to us, we are now, regularly and without knowing it, accountable to them (Snowden, 2016 ).

Compounding these concerns, strangers can now access youth in ways that magnify the potential damage done by the pointy end of the participatory paradox. Fears about stranger danger and cyberbullying have been especially acute in recent years, and while these fears are not new (Poyntz, 2013a ), they have been central to panicked reactions among parents, educators, and others wary of youth media culture. These fears are often connected to worries about online content that young people now access, including vast troves of pornography available at the click of a button, as well as worrying online sites that promote hate, terrorism, and the radicalization of youth. The actual merits of concerns about who is accessing youth and what content they are accessing are sometimes difficult to gauge; nonetheless, it remains the case that for the foreseeable future, one of the fundamental issues shaping relationships between youth, media culture, and education is how and through what means youth are produced and made ready to participate in contemporary promotional and surveillance cultures—particularly when this happens for the benefit of people and institutions that exercise immense and often dubious power in young lives.

Issue 2—Creative Media and Youth Producing Politics

On the other end of the participatory paradox is a second issue shaping youth, media culture, and learning. While network societies produce new risk conditions (like those noted previously) for teenagers, digital media undoubtedly have enabled new forms of creative participation and media production that are changing how youth agency and activism operate. Mobile phones, cameras, editing platforms, and distribution networks have become more easily accessible for young people across the global North and South in recent years, and as this has happened, youth have gained opportunities to create, circulate, collaborate, and connect with others to address civic issues and matters of broad personal and public concern in ways that simply have not been available in the past. Since the mid-1990s, online media worlds have emerged as counterenvironments that afford teenagers a rich and inviting sphere of digitally mediated experiences to explore their imaginations, hopes, and desires (Giroux, 2011 ).

The fact that young people’s online worlds are dominated by the plots and affective commodities of commercial corporations means that these worlds can foster a culture of choice and personalized goods that encourage youth to act in highly individualized ways (Livingstone, 2009 ). But the skills and networks that teens nurture online can be publicly relevant (Boyd, 2014 ; Ito et al., 2015 ). The Internet, social media, and other digital resources have in fact become central to new kinds of participatory politics and shared civic spaces that are emerging as an outgrowth and extension of young people’s cultural experiences and activities (Ito et al., 2015 ; Soep, 2014 ; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2014 ; Poyntz, 2017 ; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012 ; Bakardjieva, 2010 ).

These practices extend a history of youth actions wherein culture and cultural texts have been drawn on to contest politics and power (including issues of gender, class, race, sexuality, and ability) and matters of public concern (including climate change and the rights of indigenous communities). Youth who lack representation and recognition in formal political institutions and practices often turn to culture and cultural texts to contest politics and power (Williams, 1958 ; Dimitriadis, 2009 ; Maira & Soep, 2005 ; McRobbie, 1993 ; Hebdige, 1979 ; Hall & Jefferson, 1976 ). Recently, these tendencies have been evident in the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement , which has produced an array of cultural expressions, including a video story archive and a remarkable photo library that lays bare the experiences and hopes of a movement that aims to be “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”

Beyond North America, in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and other places, a range of bottom-up communication for social change practices has been part of epochal political actions and assemblies often led by students and other young people demanding government action on social justice and economic and human rights (Dencik & Leistert, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ). The contexts for these actions are complex, but in general, they point to instances where political cultures are emerging from young people’s cultural experiences and learning, challenging the meaning, representation, and response of those in power to matters of public concern.

More generally, across a range of youth communities, peer networks, and affinity associations, participatory media cultures are enabling levels of engagement, circulation, and cultural production by young people that are altering relationships between youth creative acts and political life. Kahne et al., 2014 have described these emerging practices as part of a wave of participatory politics that include a cross-section of actions that often extend across global communities. Examples include consumer activism (e.g., product boycotting) and lifestyle politics (e.g., vegetarianism); groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), which use characters and social justice themes from the novels to encourage connections between cultural and civic life; a community gathered around the Nerdfighters , a YouTube channel and movement organized around John and Hank Green and their mission to “decrease world suck”; fascinating examples of participatory storytelling, including the use of video memes by and about undocumented immigrant youth to draw attention to lives that have largely disappeared from mainstream media culture; and youth-driven campaigns and petitions organized in conjunction with groups like Change.org and Openmedia.ca to challenge public policy and focus attention on major injustices by institutions and officials using memes, videos, and mobile phone recordings of violence, inequity, and exploitation (Ito et al., 2015 ).

In addition to politically mobilized youth and youth drawn into mediated politics through cultural pastimes, there is evidence that youth connections to politics are being nurtured further by a diverse range of community youth media initiatives and groups that have emerged in cities across the global North and South over the past 20 years (Poyntz, 2013b , 2017 ; Asthana, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ; Tyner, 2009 ). Such community groups are part of a response to the risk conditions that shape contemporary life. They are crucial to negotiating citizenship in highly mediated cultures and for addressing digital divides to equip young people with the resources and networks necessary to manage and respond to experiences of change, injustice, violence, and possibility.

Community youth media production groups are part of an informal cultural learning sector that is an increasingly significant part of the work of provision for socially excluded youth. These groups are of many types, but they are symptomatic of a participatory media culture in which new possibilities and new opportunities have arisen to nurture youth creativity and political action. How to foster these developments through media education and the challenges confronting these efforts represents the third major issue shaping connections between youth, media culture, and learning today.

Issue 3—Youth, Media Learning, and Media Education

Media literacy education refers to learning “a set of competencies that enable one to interpret media texts and institutions, to make media of [one’s] own, and to recognize and engage with the social and political influence of media in everyday life” (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 , p. 1). We might debate this definition, but the larger point is that since at least the mid-1990s, media literacy education has made many gains in school curricula and among community groups and social movements, as noted previously (Skinner, Hackett, & Poyntz, 2015 ). At the same time, the challenges facing media literacy education are significant. For instance, the massive and relentless turn to instrumental forms of technical and creative learning in the service of job markets and competitive global positioning in formal schooling has mitigated the impact of critical media education.

Over the past two decades, a broad set of changes in schooling environments around the world have increasingly put a premium on preparing teenagers to be globally competitive, employable subjects (McDougal, 2014 ). In this context, the lure of media training in the service of work initiatives and labor market preparation is strong; thus, there has been a tendency in school and community-based media projects and organizations to focus on questions of culture and industry know-how (i.e., knowing and making media for the culture industries), as opposed to the work of public engagement and media reform. This orientation has been further encouraged by a return to basics and standardized testing across educational policy and practice, which has encouraged a move away from citizen-learning curricula (Westheimer, 2011 ; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004 ). These developments have led to efforts to redefine media education in the English curriculum in the United Kingdom, in ways that discourage critical media analysis and production (Buckingham, 2014 ).

In like fashion, the pressure to return to more traditional forms of learning has led to education policies in the United States, Australia, and parts of Canada that are intended to dissuade critical and/or citizen-oriented learning practices in schools (Poyntz, 2015 ; Hoechsmann & DeWaard, 2015 ). Poyntz ( 2013 ) has indicated elsewhere how this orientation shapes the projects of some community media groups working with young people, but the upshot is that instrumental media learning has come to complicate and sometimes frustrate how media literacy education is used to intervene in relationships among youth, media culture, and learning (Livingstone, 2009 ; Sefton-Screen, 2006 ).

This situation has been complicated further as the field of media literacy education has evolved to become a global discourse composed of a range of sometimes contradictory practices, modalities, objectives, and traditions (McDougall, 2014 ). The globalization of media literacy education has been a welcome development and is no doubt a consequence of the globalization of communication systems and the intensification of consumerism among young people around the world. But if the result of this development has been an outpouring of policy discussions, policy papers, and pilot studies across Europe, North America, Asia, and other regions (Frau-Meigs & Torrent, 2009 ), this has at the same time also produced a complex field of media literacy practices and models that have led to a generalization (and even one suspects a depoliticization) of the field. This has happened as efforts have emerged to weave media literacy education into disparate education systems and media institutions (Poyntz, 2015 ).

As the proliferation of media literacies has been underway, a raft of new media forms and practices—including cross-media, transmedia, and spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013 ) have also encouraged the production of a myriad of discourses about “ digital literacy, new media literacy [and] transmedia literacy” (McDougall, 2014 , p. 6). These and similar developments have ensured that media literacy education remains a contested field of objectives and meanings. While this can be interesting for academics, it may be less than encouraging for young people, educators, and others eager to draw on media education to affect contemporary relationships between youth, media culture, and learning. And let it be noted that the impact of these developments is not only relevant to the ways that youth negotiate media culture, but also to the future of democracy itself.

Concluding Thoughts

Media cultures have come to play a significant role in the way that young people go about making meaning in the world; this is especially true of how knowledge is shared and acquired. As a result, media are part of the continual shaping and reshaping of what learning resources look like. Both inside and outside the classroom, young people are increasingly able, even expected, to utilize the vast number of resources now available to them. Yet, many of these resources now foster worry rather than learning. The fact that “Google it,” for instance is now a common phrase referring to the act of information seeking is in itself telling; a distinct culture of learning has emerged from the development of the Internet and other media technologies. In fact, many young people today have never experienced learning without the ability to “Google it.” Yet this very culture of learning is indistinguishable from an American multinational technology company that is not beholden to the idea of a “public good.” If the project of education is not just to be for the benefit of a select few, but for society and a healthy democracy as a whole, however, then these contradictions must be engaged. So while media cultures are a significant feature of young people’s lives, it is becoming clear that media cultures have augured complicated relationships between youth and education in ways that are not easily reconciled.

The project of media education is not without its own set of challenges and contradictions, including those highlighted in this article. But it remains indispensable if educators, parents, and researchers are to support young people in navigating learning environments and imagining democratic futures.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this article have been adapted from Hoechsmann et al. ( 2012 ).

Impact of media use on children and youth

The influence of the media on the psychosocial development of children is profound. Thus, it is important for physicians to discuss with parents their child’s exposure to media and to provide guidance on age-appropriate use of all media, including television, radio, music, video games and the Internet.

The objectives of this statement are to explore the beneficial and harmful effects of media on children’s mental and physical health, and to identify how physicians can counsel patients and their families and promote the healthy use of the media in their communities.

Television has the potential to generate both positive and negative effects, and many studies have looked at the impact of television on society, particularly on children and adolescents ( 1 , 2 ). An individual child’s developmental level is a critical factor in determining whether the medium will have positive or negative effects. Not all television programs are bad, but data showing the negative effects of exposure to violence, inappropriate sexuality and offensive language are convincing ( 3 ). Still, physicians need to advocate continued research into the negative and positive effects of media on children and adolescents.

Current literature suggests the following:

Physicians can change and improve children’s television viewing habits ( 4 ).
Canadian children watch excessive amounts of television ( 5 , 6 ).
There is a relationship between watching violent television programming and an increase in violent behaviour by children ( 2 , 7 ).
Excessive television watching contributes to the increased incidence of childhood obesity ( 8 , 9 ).
Excessive television watching may have a deleterious effect on learning and academic performance ( 10 ).
Watching certain programs may encourage irresponsible sexual behaviour ( 11 ).
Television is an effective way of advertising products to children of various ages ( 12 ).

The average Canadian child watches nearly 14 h of television each week ( 13 ). By his/her high school graduation, the average teen will have spent more time watching television than in the classroom ( 2 ). Studies show how time spent watching television varies between different age groups and cultures ( 1 , 13 ). This is especially relevant when studying the effects of excessive television exposure on disadvantaged populations.

The amount of time that younger North American children currently spend watching television has not decreased significantly ( 14 ). A substantial number of children begin watching television at an earlier age and in greater amounts than what experts recommend ( 15 ). Evidence suggests that television’s influence on children and adolescents is related to how much time they spend watching television ( 1 , 2 , 16 ). As a result, with prolonged viewing, the world shown on television becomes the real world ( 1 , 2 ).

Television viewing frequently limits children’s time for vital activities such as playing, reading, learning to talk, spending time with peers and family, storytelling, participating in regular exercise, and developing other necessary physical, mental and social skills ( 9 ). In addition to the amount of time spent in front of the television, other factors that influence the medium’s effect on children include the child’s developmental level, individual susceptibility and whether children watch television alone or with their parents.

Television can be a powerful teacher ( 17 ). Watching Sesame Street is an example of how toddlers can learn valuable lessons about racial harmony, cooperation, kindness, simple arithmetic and the alphabet through an educational television format. Some public television programs stimulate visits to the zoo, libraries, bookstores, museums and other active recreational settings, and educational videos can certainly serve as powerful prosocial teaching devices. The educational value of Sesame Street , has been shown to improve the reading and learning skills of its viewers ( 18 ). In some disadvantaged settings, healthy television habits may actually be a beneficial teaching tool ( 17 ).

Still, watching television takes time away from reading and schoolwork. More recent and well-controlled studies show that even 1 h to 2 h of daily unsupervised television viewing by school-aged children has a significant deleterious effect on academic performance, especially reading ( 10 , 19 ).

The amount of violence on television is on the rise ( 20 ). The average child sees 12,000 violent acts on television annually, including many depictions of murder and rape. More than 1000 studies confirm that exposure to heavy doses of television violence increases aggressive behaviour, particularly in boys ( 2 , 21 – 23 ). Other studies link television or newspaper publicity of suicides to an increased suicide risk ( 24 – 28 ).

The following groups of children may be more vulnerable to violence on television:

children from minority and immigrant groups;
emotionally disturbed children;
children with learning disabilities;
children who are abused by their parents; and
children in families in distress ( 2 , 7 ).

Physicians who see a child with a history of aggressive behaviour should inquire about the child’s exposure to violence portrayed on television.

Because television takes time away from play and exercise activities, children who watch a lot of television are less physically fit and more likely to eat high fat and high energy snack foods ( 9 ). Television viewing makes a substantial contribution to obesity because prime time commercials promote unhealthy dietary practices ( 15 , 29 ). The fat content of advertised products exceeds the current average Canadian diet and nutritional recommendations, and most food advertising is for high calorie foods such as fast foods, candy and presweetened cereals ( 14 , 29 ). Commercials for healthy food make up only 4% of the food advertisements shown during children’s viewing time ( 8 ). The number of hours of television viewing also corresponds with an increased relative risk of higher cholesterol levels in children ( 8 ). Television can also contribute to eating disorders in teenage girls, who may emulate the thin role models seen on television ( 8 ). Eating meals while watching television should be discouraged because it may lead to less meaningful communication and, arguably, poorer eating habits ( 29 , 30 ).

Today, television has become a leading sex educator in Canada. Between 1976 and 1996, there has been a 270% increase in sexual interactions during the family hour of 2000 hours to 2100 hours( 31 ). Television exposes children to adult sexual behaviours in ways that portray these actions as normal and risk-free, sending the message that because these behaviours are frequent, ‘everybody does it’. Sex between unmarried partners is shown 24 times more often than sex between spouses ( 32 – 35 ), while sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy are rarely mentioned.

Teens rank the media as the leading source of information about sex, second only to school sex education programs. Numerous studies document adolescents’ susceptibility to the media’s influence on their sexual attitudes, values and beliefs ( 34 , 35 ).

A detailed guide to responsible sexual content on television, and in films and music can be found in other peer-reviewed publications ( 35 ).

Some people believe that the media can influence sexual responsibility by promoting birth control, such as condom use. No current empirical evidence supports this concept; it is expected that the debate will continue.

Alcohol and smoking

Canada’s two largest breweries spend $200 million on advertising each year ( 36 ). On an annual basis, teenagers see between 1000 and 2000 beer commercials carrying the message that ‘real’ men drink beer. Convincing data suggest that advertising increases beer consumption ( 34 , 37 ), and in countries such as Sweden, a ban on alcohol advertising has led to a decline in alcohol consumption ( 38 ).

Tobacco products are not advertised directly on television in Canada. However, passive promotion occurs when, for example, a soap opera star lights a cigarette in a ‘macho’ act, a Formula One race car has cigarette advertising on it or sporting events carry the names of tobacco companies. There is evidence that passive advertising, which glamorizes smoking ( 28 ), has increased over the past few years.

Television is not the only way that children learn about tobacco and alcohol use; the concern is that the consequences of these behaviours are not accurately depicted on television. One-half of the G-rated animated feature films available on videocassette, as well as many music videos, show alcohol and tobacco use as normative behaviour without conveying the long term consequences of this use ( 39 ).

Advertising

Advertising can have positive effects on children’s behaviour. For example, some alcohol manufacturers spend 10% of their budget on advertisements warning about the dangers of drinking and driving. In addition, although some health care professionals disagree about the health benefits of appropriate milk use, milk consumption has increased as a result of print and broadcast advertisements.

The developmental stage of a child plays a role in the effect of commercials. Young children do not understand the concept of a sales pitch. They tend to believe what they are told and may even assume that they are deprived if they do not have advertised products. Most preschool children do not understand the difference between a program designed to entertain and a commercial designed to sell. A number of studies have documented that children under the age of eight years are developmentally unable to understand the difference between advertising and regular programming ( 12 , 40 , 41 ).

The average child sees more than 20,000 commercials each year ( 12 ). More than 60% of commercials promote sugared cereals, candy, fatty foods and toys ( 12 ). Cartoon programs based on toy products are especially attractive. Advertisements targeting adolescents are profoundly influential, particularly on cigarette use ( 4 ).

The question of whether children are more resilient to the influence of television is debated frequently. Most studies show that the more time children spend watching television, the more they are influenced by it ( 4 ). Earlier studies have shown that boys may be more susceptible than girls to television violence ( 25 ).

Education and parental involvement

High school programs promoting media awareness have been shown to be beneficial ( 4 ). They give students more understanding of how the media may affect them socially. In Canada, the Media Awareness Network has a number of resources that can be used by both professionals and the public to promote media literacy. Their resources are comprehensive, current and specifically applicable to Canadian culture ( 42 ).

Parents may use ratings but they must be used with caution. Currently, there is no consensus as to which rating system works best ( 43 ). Parental involvement in determining desirable programming is the best choice. Parents have to monitor and control their children’s viewing habits.

Studies show that parents play an important role in their children’s social learning ( 44 ), but if a parent’s views are not discussed explicitly with children, the medium may teach and influence by default. Other media, such as magazines, radio, video games and the Internet, also have the potential to influence children’s eating habits, exercise habits, buying habits and mental health. If children are allowed to be exposed to these media without adult supervision, they may have the same deleterious effects as television.

MUSIC VIDEOS

Music videos may have a significant behavioural impact by desensitizing viewers to violence and making teenagers more likely to approve of premarital sex ( 45 ). Up to 75% of videos contain sexually explicit material ( 45 ), and more than half contain violence that is often committed against women. Women are portrayed frequently in a condescending manner that affects children’s attitudes about sex roles.

Attractive role models are the aggressors in more than 80% of music video violence. Males are more than three times as likely to be the aggressors; blacks were overrepresented and whites underrepresented. Music videos may reinforce false stereotypes. A detailed analysis of music videos raised concerns about its effects on adolescents’ normative expectations about conflict resolution, race and male-female relationships ( 46 ).

Music lyrics have become increasingly explicit, particularly with references to sex, drugs and violence. Research linking a cause-and-effect relationship between explicit lyrics and adverse behavioural effects is still in progress at this time. Meanwhile, the potential negative impact of explicit music lyrics should put parents and paediatricians on guard – paediatricians should bring this up in anticipatory guidance discussions with teenagers and their parents. At the very least, parents should take an active role in monitoring the music their children are exposed to ( 45 ).

VIDEO GAMES

Some video games may help the development of fine motor skills and coordination, but many of the concerns about the negative effects of television (eg, inactivity, asocial behaviour and violence) also apply to excessive exposure to video games. Violent video games should be discouraged because they have harmful effects on children’s mental development ( 7 , 47 ). Parents should be advised to familiarize themselves with various rating systems for video games and use this knowledge to make their decisions.

The effect of violent video games on children has been a public health concern for many years. No quantitative analysis of video game contents for games rated as suitable for all audiences was made until 2001 ( 47 ). The study concluded that many video games rated as suitable for all audiences contained significant amounts of violence (64% contained intentional violence and 60% rewarded players for injuring a character). Therefore, current ratings of video games leave much room for improvement ( 43 ).

Parents may feel outsmarted or overwhelmed by their children’s computer and Internet abilities, or they may not appreciate that the ‘new medium’ is an essential component of the new literacy, something in which their children need to be fluent. These feelings of inadequacy or confusion should not prevent them from discovering the Internet’s benefits. The dangers inherent in this relatively uncontrolled ‘wired’ world are many and varied, but often hidden. These dangers must be unmasked and a wise parent will learn how to protect their children by immersing themselves in the medium and taking advice from the many resources aimed at protecting children while allowing them to reap the rich benefits in a safe environment. The physician is in a good position to encourage parents and children to discover the Internet and to use it wisely.

The Internet has a significant potential for providing children and youth with access to educational information, and can be compared with a huge home library. However, the lack of editorial standards limits the Internet’s credibility as a source of information. There are other concerns as well.

The amount of time spent watching television and sitting in front of computers can affect a child’s postural development ( 48 ). Excessive amounts of time at a computer can contribute to obesity, undeveloped social skills and a form of addictive behaviour ( 9 ). Although rare, some children with seizure disorders are more prone to attacks brought on by a flickering television or computer screen. No data suggest that television viewing causes weakness of the eyes. It may be different when a child is closely exposed to a computer screen for long periods, although there are no definitive references to support this.

Other concerns include pedophiles who use the Internet to lure young people into relationships. There is also the potential for children to be exposed to pornographic material. Parents can use technology that blocks access to pornography and sex talk on the Internet, but must be aware that this technology does not replace their supervision or guidance.

There is a wealth of information on coping with the vast resources of the Web, both good and bad. Above all, parents should be encouraged to appreciate that there is potential for more good than bad, as long as one has the knowledge to tell the difference. Canadian youth claim the Internet as a defining part of their culture and an integral part of their daily lives ( 6 ). Physicians and parents alike must be armed and ready to face that challenge and ensure that they reap the potential benefits as safely as possible ( Table 1 ).

Benefits and risks of Internet use by children and youth

, , )

or my.webmd.com/content/article/34/1728_85382

RECOMMENDATIONS

Physicians should regularly inquire about media habits when taking a psychosocial history, using the Media History Form developed by the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) and the Media Awareness Network ( 51 ). They should also ask about video watching, use of video games, radio programs and time spent in front of the computer, especially when dealing with aggressive and particularly vulnerable children and families ( 7 ).
Physicians should become more familiar with the kinds of media to which their patients may be exposed, such as programs that portray irresponsible sex and violence, and questionable Internet sites.
Physicians should make parents aware of the significance of television early in a child’s life. By the end of the first year of a child’s life, there should be ground rules for television viewing and healthy viewing habits should be established in the second year of life. Patient education tools developed by the CPS and the Media Awareness Network can be used to supplement teaching. Visit www.caringforkids.cps.ca for more information.
Physicians should continue to increase their own level of awareness about the most recent data on the influence of media on the development of their patients’ psychosocial health ( www.media-awareness.ca is one of the most comprehensive Canadian resources for further education).
Physicians are encouraged to learn about the scope of Internet-related issues to adequately advise parents during their visits for anticipatory guidance. The Media History Tool ( 51 ) can be used to identify areas of concern and to facilitate discussion with parents and children. They can be encouraged to develop a family agreement for on-line use at home. The Media Awareness Network Web site ( www.media-awareness.ca ) has suggestions on how to do this.

Physicians should encourage families to do the following:

Families should be encouraged to explore media together and discuss their educational value. Children should be encouraged to criticize and analyze what they see in the media. Parents can help children differentiate between fantasy and reality, particularly when it comes to sex, violence and advertising.
No child should be allowed to have a television, computer or video game equipment in his or her bedroom. A central location is strongly advised with common access and common passwords.
Television watching should be limited to less than 1 h to 2 h per day. Families may want to consider more active and creative ways to spend time together.
Older children should be offered an opportunity to make choices by planning the week’s viewing schedule in advance. Ideally, parents should supervise these choices and be good role models by making their own wise choices. Parents should explain why some programs are not suitable and praise children for making good and appropriate choices.
Families should limit the use of television, computers or video games as a diversion, substitute teacher or electronic nanny. Parents should also ask alternative caregivers to maintain the same rules for media use in their absence. The rules in divorced parents’ households should be consistent.

Physicians who want to get involved in their communities can consider the following:

Provide parents with resources and information to promote media awareness programs in their communities and schools. The Media Awareness Network ( www.media-awareness.ca ) has resources and research reports for parents, teachers, teenagers and others.
Promote the implementation of high school programs in media awareness, which have proven to be beneficial ( 4 ).
Express support for good media. In addition to writing to stations that broadcast responsible and good television programs, physicians and parents can support legislation that encourages more responsible media use.
Support efforts to eliminate alcohol advertising on television with the same enthusiasm that led to the elimination of tobacco advertising.
Consider accepting invitations to talk to parent groups, school boards and other organizations about the impact of media on children and youth. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Media Awareness Network have kits that include a fully scripted text, colourful slides, a fact sheet and audience handouts. Visit www.cps.ca or www.media-awareness.ca for more information.
Support further research on the impact of media on the mental and physical well-being of children and adolescents.

PSYCHOSOCIAL PAEDIATRICS COMMITTEE

Members: Drs Anne C Bernard-Bonnin, Hôpital Sainte-Justine, Montréal, Quebec; Kim Joyce Burrows, Kelowna, British Columbia; Anthony Ford-Jones, Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital, Burlington, Ontario; Sally Longstaffe, Children’s Hospital, Winnipeg, Manitoba (chair); Theodore A. Prince, Calgary, Alberta; Sarah Emerson Shea, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia (director responsible)

Consultants: Drs Rose Geist, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario; William J Mahoney, Children’s Hospital-Hamilton HSC, Hamilton, Ontario; Peter Nieman, Alberta Children’s Hospital, Calgary, Alberta

Liaisons: Drs Joseph F. Hagan, University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, Vermont (American Academy of Pediatrics); Anton Miller, Sunnyhill Health Centre for Children, Vancouver, British Columbia (Developmental Paediatrics Section, Canadian Paediatric Society)

Principal author: Drs Anthony Ford-Jones, Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital, Burlington, Ontario; Peter Nieman, Alberta Children’s Hospital, Calgary, Alberta

The recommendations in this statement do not indicate an exclusive course of treatment or procedure to be followed. Variations, taking into account individual circumstances, may be appropriate.

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The Influence Of Mass Media On Teenagers

It isn’t a controversial statement to make that mass media is arguably the most influential and impressionable force on the lives of young people all over the globe. Overall, the term is used to describe press, radio, television, internet, and literature, all of the various formats that come together to make up what we as a population consume as ‘media’. As technology has advanced throughout the decades, so has the human race’s dependence on its cumulative output, and as result, much conversation has been centred in recent years on the effect and influence that mass media overload can have on young and teenage minds. Is the influence a positive one or a negative one? Does it depend on the specific media being consumed? Does it depend on the individual? These are just three questions; there are so many more on the table. This essay aims to briefly discuss the influence of mass media on teenagers in greater detail.

The first issue that warrants discussion, one that impacts on everything else in an umbrella type fashion, is the simple fact of accessibility that young people have today to all forms of media. Whereas once upon a time the only exposure teenagers might have had was the selected programmes on a handful of television channels and the menu of news selected by broadcasters, there is now an open gate to an entire world of information. On one hand, this can be argued to be a good thing, allowing teens to seek their own media and cultivate their own world education and experience. On the other hand, however, a problem can arise in terms of the quality, authenticity, and safety of the content that they are accessing in this age of ‘fake news’ and internet trolling. Relating back to the key topic word of ‘influence’, it can therefore be argued that the relative freedom teens have to seek out unlimited and unregulated entertainment and information can become a dangerous situation.

Of course, this argument leads in to another key element of the discussion, which is the element of the individual being responsible rather than the available mass media. When it comes to how much time one spends on social media platforms, how much time one spends playing video games, and how much time one spends watching television, those are all choices that are made by the individual. The media is always there ready to be consumed, but ultimately it is the active choice of the person in question how long they allow themselves to be exposed. Of course, the more vulnerable or susceptible a person is, the more likely they are to be influenced, so the dynamic exists as something of a double edged sword.

The issue of addiction is something that is becoming more and more prevalent amongst young people with regards to their relationship with mass media. The last two generations, one could say, have grown up never knowing a world without the kinds of technology that opens up the world to you, and conversely, opens up you to the world. Whereas an adult of 35 years and older might not be so reliant on an online existence, the lives of teenagers in 2018 are so intertwined with Internet activity that they can almost be seen as a captive market. There is no doubting that companies use this modern predicament to promote and push various products, trends, philosophies, and ideologies, to the point where impressionable young people can certainly be influenced by what they are seeing in day in day out.

On the darker, more sinister side of the argument, there is the notion of formats like video games and aggressive music being responsible for influencing and cultivating an air of violence in teenage consumers. Admittedly, there are high profile cases of incidents that bear unfortunate similarities to graphic gaming and media, but given the overwhelming percentage on the contrary, it is hard not to consider this as just another footnote in the wider scope of individual decision and choice over overt mass media influence.

In conclusion, it would be fair to surmise that the issue of mass media having influence over the teenagers of today is one that is never going to be ‘solved’ or placed comfortably in one bracket or another. The wide reaching grasp of the internet and all that it entails is only going in one direction, and that is forwards and upwards. As a result, it is going to be up to teens themselves to mould their own experiences. The will to influence on mass media’s part is transparent and unapologetic, so it is going to remain the responsibility of the individual to determine how much they expose themselves to and how much they allow it to affect them. Of course, as with any topic involving the state of the human mind, nothing is ever as cleat cut as that.

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Studying Media Effects on Children and Youth: Improving Methods and Measures: Workshop Summary (2006)

Chapter: 1 introduction, chapter 1 introduction.

The presence and intensity of media influences—television, radio, music, computers, films, videos, and the Internet—are increasingly recognized as an important part of the social ecology of children and youth, and these influences have become more visible and volatile in recent decades. Research that explores the level and effects of media influences calls for measurements of the quantity and character of exposure to a variety of potentially overlapping media sources, an analysis of the content of the media output, and examination of the social context and relationships that are associated with the media experience.

Additional effort is needed to develop theories that can identify underlying processes and mechanisms that link media influences to outcomes. Outcomes in turn call for tools that can measure, evaluate, and help explain how certain media experiences influence, and are influenced by, health and behavioral factors as well as cognitive and developmental processes. Methodologies from a variety of disciplines— communications, economics, neuroscience, pediatrics, and psychology, to name a few— have been applied to these questions, and a strong body of research and valuable findings has emerged. Nevertheless, the field is relatively young and many methodological and theoretical questions remain, even as new digital technologies continue to pose unique challenges to researchers.

While current media studies focus on the social environment of the millennium generation, there is nothing new in adults being worried about corrupting influences on young people. Early Greek philosophers argued about the relative merits of a focus on rhetoric in the education of their youth at the expense of reason and understanding. When novels were first published during the eighteenth century, many people were concerned that readers, especially the young, would be corrupted by the licentious and immoral behavior described, as well as by the indolent lifestyle they perceived novel readers to follow. By the twentieth century, the potential causes for concern had proliferated dramatically. Today, media experiences seem to expand by the month, and while much of the concern about their influence on young people may represent older worries in new forms, the media ecology of today’s children and youth also presents a new frontier that offers unique challenges for research studies.

A child born in the 1930s might have spent as much as several hours a week listening to the radio; reading comic books, newspapers, or magazines; or watching a film at a local theatre. Since television was first introduced in the 1950s, the number of hours young people spend interacting in some way with media, as well as the range and capabilities of the many devices and activities that could be considered media experiences, have increased to an extent far beyond the imagining of today’s grandparents when they were young. Children today use electronic media from two to five hours daily, and infants—even in utero—are regularly exposed to a variety of media

stimuli. This pervasive experience has raised many questions about how media exposure, content, and context influence young people’s health, development, and behavior.

Researchers are increasingly concerned not only with how much time children spend with the media in general, but also with how they apportion their exposure over different sources and types of media. Furthermore, interest is growing in examining how the experience with media exposure, content, and context has changed over the decades in response to new media features and technologies as well as reflecting other social and economic trends. As an increasingly pervasive and vibrant part of the social ecology of children and youth, media influences have drawn the attention of parents, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to curb risky exposures as well as to identify ways to promote positive media practices that can foster healthy development.

These questions are extremely complicated to investigate. Recognizing the importance of this research, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, under the auspices of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, and with the sponsorship of the Henry J.Kaiser Family Foundation, held a workshop in March 2006. Its purpose was twofold: to examine the quality of the measures used in studies of the effects of media on children’s health and development and to identify gaps in both research and practice. The goal was for a variety of experts to consider steps and strategies that could move this research forward and improve its utility for helping parents, practitioners, and policy makers guide young people in navigating a media-rich environment.

The specific charge to the Program Committee for a Workshop on Improving Research on Interactive Media and Children’s Health, which planned the workshop, was to consider:

The nature of key research literatures that examine different types of media exposure among children and youth; as well as the types of behaviors and interactions associated with media use (including television, video games, computers, cell phones, and the Internet);

The strengths and limitations of different types of measures used in studies of media, children, and youth; and

Opportunities and strategies for developing one or more studies in this field that can inform the development of research, policy, and practice guidelines regarding media use, content, controls, and guidance for children and youth.

The committee met once by phone and collaborated via electronic mail to develop strategies for describing how media research is conducted and the methodological issues it poses. This planning effort prompted the development of two background papers and a subsequent day-long discussion that included sessions on the state of the art in current measures of media exposure; the research designs, tools, and frameworks used in social epidemiological and prevention research; and the role of theory in explaining relationships among media exposure and outcomes. In this way the committee was able to represent a variety of perspectives, even though the available time would not allow for comprehensive coverage of any of the issues.

This report provides a summary of that discussion, supplemented with information from two papers prepared for the workshop, which are available at

< http://www.bocyf.org/030206.html >. It begins with an examination of the potential impact of media exposure, followed by a description of the basic research questions and the methods currently used to study them. Methodological questions and challenges and theoretical approaches are described; they are discussed from the perspective of other kinds of epidemiological research. The report closes with a discussion of future directions for the field.

The presence and intensity of media influences television, radio, music, computers, films, videos, and the Internet are increasingly recognized as an important part of the social ecology of children and youth, and these influences have become more visible and volatile in recent decades. Research that explores the level and effects of media influences calls for measurements of the quantity and character of exposure to a variety of potentially overlapping media sources, an analysis of the content of the media output, and examination of the social context and relationships that are associated with the media experience.

Recognizing the importance of this research, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, under the auspices of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, and with the sponsorship of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, held a workshop in March 2006. Its purpose was twofold: to examine the quality of the measures used in studies of the effects of media on children's health and development and to identify gaps in both research and practice. The goal was for a variety of experts to consider steps and strategies that could move this research forward and improve its utility for helping parents, practitioners, and policy makers guide young people in navigating a media-rich environment.

Studying Media Effects on Children and Youth provides a summary of that discussion, supplemented with information from two papers prepared for the workshop. It begins with an examination of the potential impact of media exposure, followed by a description of the basic research questions and the methods currently used to study them. Methodological questions and challenges and theoretical approaches are described; they are discussed from the perspective of other kinds of epidemiological research. This report closes with a discussion of future directions for the field.

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Effects of Social Media and Internet Words: 601
Social Media Nature and Influence Words: 638
Youth’s Use of Social Media and Its Impact on Narcissism Words: 1646
Social Media in Moderation Words: 1444
The Influence of Social Media on Mental Health Words: 2391
Social Media’s Influence on American Culture Words: 1112
Social Media Effect on Young People Words: 575
The Power of Social Media Words: 2322
Negative Effects of Social Media on Health Words: 1166
Social Media’s Influence Importance Words: 604
How Social Media Contribute to Mental Health Words: 1744
Are Social Media a Good Thing to Society? Words: 1392

The Influence of Social Media on Youth

Introduction, positive effects, negative outcomes, additional benefit.

These days, media channels are becoming more diverse and innovative. Information and communication technologies and their discoveries provide the media environment intensification. Digital developments are nearly correlated with global and societal changes displayed through the update of social values and interpersonal communication models. These trends are more evident among youth as this social group is the most mobile and responsive to almost all aspects of progress. The media culture of a young person remains remarkably crucial in this process.

The question of how social media impacts youth remains debatable. The book called “Youth and Media: Current Perspectives on Media Use and Effects” examines the effects of the Internet on young people’s socialization: both positive and negative (Baumgartner et al.). The young user faces a massive stream of various information on the Internet. This is partially deposited in the mind and can influence the formation of young people’s attitudes to different aspects of life, their worldview, and the ability to socialize.

First of all, social media affects the mental health of a young person positively. Social media facilitates horizontal connections between people and are used to spread information. According to Baumgartner et al. (45), the media, especially the Internet, provides social support for teenagers, decreasing loneliness and isolation, and helping build new friendships online. The Internet has connected different societies and their cultures in everyday communication and is now creating social relationships on the network (Baumgartner et al. 56). The book’s authors provide various examples of how social media allows for uniting people with similar views. For instance, Baumgartner et al. (56) claim that young people tend to join communities because of the expectation of reciprocity, respect, and a feeling of effectiveness. Users also perceive the online group of interest as a place to interact with its other members. If it is appropriately structured, a community can also be a “safe” place to express ideas (Baumgartner et al. 56). Since young people feel more comfortable and relaxed online than in real life, they can have opinions on various topics without fear of being judged and compared, which contributes to a person’s well-being and mental health.

Secondly, communication on social networks allows the youth to master and maintain relationships with friends and relatives. For example, Baumgartner et al. (87) note that sharing photos on social media enhances family relationships. Online friendship increases the social capital and circle of acquaintances (Baumgartner et al. 87). Its increase leads to an awareness of one’s own needs and significance (Baumgartner et al. 88). The positive effect of the Internet’s influence on young people’s socialization is meaningful. People have new online platforms and chances for interaction and information exchange, facilitating, and accelerating socialization.

Despite some positive sides, several adverse outcomes caused by imbalanced social media usage are presented in the book. For instance, Baumgartner et al. (130) emphasize that young people with insufficient interpersonal experience who have difficulties in live communication perceive the network as more convenient. Consequently, overuse of the Internet can be addictive, leading to depression. Baumgartner et al. (132) observed that young people’s addiction to social networking online leads to using the Internet in more intrusive ways. Therefore, the book reveals not only beneficial factors of social media usage but also states that in case teenagers have poor communication skills offline, they are likely to prioritize online conversations. It may provoke communication anxiety, while the latter stimulates obsessive network use.

Moreover, people who spend much time on social media tend to consider online communication convenient but restrained in communicative effectiveness. It appears due to the lack of various non-verbal cues available in real interaction (Baumgartner et al. 135). According to Baumgartner et al. (136), anxiety resulting from live interaction motivates an obsessive request to communicate safely online, while successful communication attempts increase the amount of time spent on the Internet.

Nevertheless, the book’s compilers suggest that social media enables online learning for those who pursue self-education. According to Baumgartner et al. (60), the possibility of acquiring knowledge and information online affects young people’s socialization, breaking down geographic barriers between people and empowering them to receive information regardless of location. Plunging into a topic of interest, teenagers try to achieve recognition for their expertise. Some researchers call this phenomenon “geek learning” (Baumgartner et al. 97). According to Baumgartner et al. (102), the active use of social networks for communication increases students’ average scores, especially in senior years. Therefore, for numerous adolescents, social networking is an essential motive for self-development.

The Internet, especially media, is integral to the daily life of all people. Society should not categorically affirm that social media causes only benefit or only adverse outcomes. The book “Youth and Media: Current Perspectives on Media Use and Effects” focuses on the fact that social networks’ influence on youth is diverse and ambiguous. The impact on a particular individual depends on their subjective qualities. For example, communication through the Internet can be harmful as it leads to social anxiety and a lack of real-life communication. Simultaneously, this can help those who intend to find new friends and express their thoughts clearly. People should stay conscious about the use of social networks to be able to get the maximum benefit and minimum negative consequences. The Internet has advantages and disadvantages concerning the human mind, largely shaping its position and worldview, and affecting people’s ability to socialize.

Baumgartner, Susanne E., et al., editors. Youth and Media: Current Perspectives on Media Use and Effects . Nomos Verlag, 2018.

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Media Violence Effects on Children, Adolescents and Young Adults

BY: CRAIG A. ANDERSON, MA, PhD

I killed my first Klingon in 1979. It took place in the computer center at Stanford University, where I was playing a new video game based on the Star Trek television series. I was an "early adopter" of the new technology of video games, and continued to be so for many years, first as a fan of this entertainment medium, and later as a researcher interested in the question of what environmental factors influence aggressive and violent behavior.

Of course, like most young men and women of that era, I had grown up witnessing thousands of killings and other acts of aggression in a wide array of television shows and films. Today's youth are even more inundated with media violence than past generations, mostly from entertainment sources but also from news and educational media. And even though the public remains largely unaware of the conclusiveness of more than six decades of research on the effects of exposure to screen media violence, the scientists most directly involved in this research know quite a bit about these effects.

The briefest summary of hundreds of scientific studies can be boiled down to two main points. First, exposure to media violence is a causal risk factor for physical aggression, both immediately after the exposure and months, even years, later. Second, in the absence of other known risk factors for violence, high exposure to media violence will not turn a normal well-adjusted child or adolescent into a mass killer.

SOME DEFINITIONS One reason for much of the confusion and debate among even highly educated citizens, health care professionals and even a few scientists is that when media violence researchers use certain terms and concepts, they have somewhat different meanings than when the general public uses the same words.

By "aggression," researchers mean "behavior that is intended to harm another person who does not wish to be harmed." Thus, hitting, kicking, pinching, stabbing and shooting are types of physical aggression.

Playing soccer or basketball or even football with energy and confidence are not usually considered acts of aggression, even though that is what most coaches mean when they exhort their charges to "play aggressively." Somehow, the phrase "play assertively" doesn't have the same ring to it.

By "violent behavior," most modern aggression and violence scholars mean "aggressive behavior (as defined above) that has a reasonable chance of causing harm serious enough to require medical attention." Note that the behavior does not have to actually cause the harm to be classified as violent; shooting at a person but missing still qualifies as a violent behavior.

By "media violence" we mean scenes and story lines in which at least one character behaves aggressively towards at least one other character, using the above definition of "aggression," not the definition of "violence." Thus, television shows, movies, and video games in which characters fight (Power Rangers, for example), or say mean things about each other (often called relational aggression), or kill bad guys, all are instances of media violence, even if there is no blood, no gore, no screaming in pain. By this definition, most modern video games rated by the video game industry as appropriate for children — up to 90 percent, by some estimates — are violent video games.

AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE Short-term and long-term effects of violent media use on aggressive behavior have been demonstrated by numerous studies across age, culture, gender, even personality types. Overall, the research literature suggests that media violence effects are not large, but they accumulate over time to produce significant changes in behavior that can significantly influence both individuals and society.

For example, one of the longest duration studies of the same individuals found that children exposed to lots of violent television shows at age 8 later became more violent adults at age 30, even after statistically controlling for how aggressive they were at age 8.

Similar long-term effects (up to three years, so far) on aggressive and violent behavior have been found for frequent exposure to violent video games. One six-month longitudinal study found that frequent violent video game play at the beginning of a school year was associated with a 25 percent increase in the likelihood of being in a physical fight during that year, even after controlling for whether or not the child had been in a fight the previous year.

Short-term experimental studies, in which children are randomly assigned to either a violent or nonviolent media exposure condition for a brief period, conclusively demonstrate that the media violence effects are causal. In one such study, for example, children who played a child-oriented violent video game (i.e., no blood, gore, screaming …) later attempted to deliver 47 percent more high-intensity punishments to another child than did children who had been randomly assigned to play a nonviolent video game. Even cartoonish media violence increases aggression.

In recent years, there have been several intervention studies designed to test whether reducing exposure to screen violence over several months or longer can reduce inappropriate aggressive behavior. These randomized control experiments have found that, yes, children and adolescents randomly assigned to the media intervention conditions show a decrease in aggression relative to those in the control conditions.

HOW MEDIA VIOLENCE INCREASES AGGRESSION How does exposure to media violence lead to increased aggressive behavior? Media violence scholars have identified several basic psychological processes involved. They differ somewhat for short-term versus long-term effects, but they all involve various types of learning.

Short-term effects are those that occur immediately after exposure. The main ways that media violence exposure increases aggression in the short term are:

Direct imitation of the observed behavior
Observational learning of attitudes, beliefs and expected benefits of aggression
Increased excitation
Priming of aggression-related ways of thinking and feeling

In essence, for at least a brief period after viewing or playing violent media, the exposed person thinks in more aggressive ways, feels more aggressive, perceives that others are hostile towards him or her and sees aggressive solutions as being more acceptable and beneficial.

The short-term effects typically dissipate quickly. However, with repeated exposure to violent media, the child or adolescent "learns" these short-term lessons in a more permanent way, just as practicing multiplication tables or playing chess improves performance on those skills. That is, the person comes to hold more positive beliefs about aggressive solutions to conflict, develops what is sometimes called a "hostile attribution bias" (a tendency to view ambiguous negative events in a hostile way) and becomes more confident that an aggressive action on their part will work.

There also is growing evidence that repeated exposure to blood, gore and other aspects of extremely violent media can lead to emotional desensitization to the pain and suffering of others. In turn, such desensitization can lead to increased aggression by removing one of the built-in brakes that normally inhibits aggression and violence. Furthermore, this desensitization effect reduces the likelihood of pro-social, empathetic, helping behavior when viewing a victim of violence.

Interestingly, these same basic learning and priming effects account for the fact that exposure to nonviolent, pro-social media can lead to increased pro-social behavior.

SCREEN TIME EFFECTS For a number of years, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended very strict limits on children's exposure to any types of screen media, including TVs and computers, primarily because of concern about attention deficits. For example, they recommend that children under the age of 2 years have no exposure to electronic screens, even nonviolent media. Recent research with children, adolescents and young adults suggests that both nonviolent and violent media contribute to real-world attention problems, such as attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Furthermore, these attention problems are strongly linked to aggressive behavior, especially impulsive types of aggression.

Another emerging problem with video game usage goes by various addiction-related labels, such as video game addiction, internet addiction and internet/gaming disorder. Research across multiple countries and various measures of problematic game use suggests that about 8 percent of "gamers" have serious problems with their gaming habit. That is, their gaming activities interfere with significant aspects of their lives, such as interpersonal relationships, school or work activities. This newer research literature suggests that for some individuals, video game problems look much like gambling addiction.

MAGNITUDE OF HARM News media often report exaggerated claims about "the" cause of the most recent violent tragedy, whether it is a school shooting or another mass killing. Sometimes the cause that is hyped by these stories is violent video games; other times it is mental illness, or gun control, or lack of gun control.

Behavioral scientists (and reasonably thoughtful people in general) know that human behavior is complex, and it is affected by many variables. Violence researchers in particular know that such extreme events as homicide cannot be boiled down to a single cause. Instead, behavioral scientists (including violence scholars) rely on what is known as risk and resilience models, or risk and protective factors.

All consequential behavior is influenced by dozens (maybe hundreds) of risk and protective factors. In the violence domain, there are dozens of known risk and protective factors. Growing up in a violent household or seeing lots of violence in one's neighborhood are two such risk factors. Growing up in a nonviolent household and having warm, caring parents who are highly involved with child rearing are protective factors. From this perspective, exposure to media violence is one known risk factor for later inappropriate aggression and violence. It is not the most important risk factor; joining a violent gang is a good candidate for that title. But it also isn't the least important risk factor.

Indeed, some studies suggest that media violence exposure carries about the same risk potential as having abusive parents or antisocial parents. One major difference from other known risk factors for later aggression and violence is that parents and caregivers can relatively easily and inexpensively reduce a child's exposure to media violence.

WHY BELIEVE THIS ARTICLE? It is easy to find very vocal critics of the mainstream summary that I have presented in this article. A simple web search will generate links to any number of them. Many of the critics are supported by the media industries in one way or another, many are heavy users of violent media and so feel threatened by violence research (much like cigarette smokers once felt threatened by cancer research), some are threatened by anything they see as impinging on free-speech rights, and many are simply ignorant about the science. But, a few appear to have relevant scientific credentials. So, a reasonable question for a parent or health care professional to ask is why believe that exposure to media violence creates harmful effects, rather than maintain the much more comfortable position that there are no harmful effects.

The simple answer is this: Every major professional scientific body that has conducted reviews of the scientific literature has come to the same conclusion. This group includes the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the U.S. Surgeon General and the International Society for Research on Aggression, among others. I have posted these and other, similar reports online. 1

In 1972, former U.S. Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld, MD, testified before the U.S. Senate on his assessment of the research on TV violence and behavior: "It is clear to me that the causal relationship between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action," he said. "There comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come." 2

In response to one or two vocal critics of the mainstream research community and perhaps to pressure from other groups, the American Psychological Association created a new media violence assessment panel in 2013 to assess the association's 2005 statement and update it. They took a very unusual step to avoid any appearance of bias by excluding all major mainstream media violence scholars from the panel. Instead, the panel was composed of reputable psychological science scholars with expertise in developmental, social and related psychology domains, along with leading meta-analysis statistical experts. Their report, released in 2015, confirmed what the mainstream media violence research community has been saying for years: There are real and harmful effects of violent media.

Violent media are neither the harmless fun that the media industries and their apologists would like you to believe, nor are they the cause of the downfall of society that some alarmists proclaim. Nonetheless, electronic media in the 21st century dominate many children's and adolescents' waking hours, taking more time than any other activity, even time in school and interactions with parents. Thus, electronic media have become important socializing agents, agents that have a measurable impact.

Many of the effects of nonviolent electronic media are positive, but the vast majority of violent media effects are negative. Parents and other caregivers can mitigate the harmful effects of violent media in several ways, such as by increasing positive or "protective" factors in the child's environment, and by reducing exposure to violent media. This is not an easy task, but it can be done with little or no expense. The benefits of doing so are healthier, happier, more successful children, adolescents and young adults.

CRAIG A. ANDERSON is Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, and director of the Center for the Study of Violence, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.

http://public.psych.iastate.edu/caa/StatementsonMediaViolence.html .
Jesse Feldman, statement in hearings before Subcommittee on Communications of Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Serial #92-52 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972) 25-27.

For reprint permission, contact Betty Crosby or call (314) 253-3490.

Also in this Issue

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Violence: A Community Health Approach
Why a Trash-Strewn Lot Became a Soccer Field
Leaving Gangs Behind to Live Parables of Kinship
Women Religious Unite to Eradicate Trafficking

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Media / Influence Of Mass Media On Youth Violence

Influence Of Mass Media On Youth Violence

Category: Sociology , Social Issues
Topic: Media , Society , Youth Violence

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