CULTIVATION THEORY: NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON 21st CENTURY CHILDREN
What we think
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In my opinion, TV viewing is really harming children. Their mind is the most impressionable one. Anything wrong printed on it, is difficult to remove. I submit that the most telling effect is on children’s health.
Many have to wear glasses because of weak eyesight due to continuous viewing of TV. The regularity of life suffers a lot. Homework is its victim. Studies are not done properly to save time for TV.
I believe that watching TV exposes child’s to an easy life as it is seen in films. But outside, life is different. Children think that life is like that as is seen in films, etc.
So TV viewing is not helping children in making them as responsible and understanding adults. In my opinion, we are giving them an environment which will drift them away from the realities of life. This will lead to frustration and disillusionment.
My last point of argument is that the most serious and harmful effect of Television on children is the exposure of young minds to violence.
Children often behave differently after they've been watching violent programs on TV. In one study done at Pennsylvania State University, about 100 preschool children were observed both before and after watching television; some watched cartoons that had a lot of aggressive and violent acts in them, and others watched shows that didn't have any kind of violence. The researchers noticed real differences between the kids who watched the violent shows and those who watched nonviolent ones.
Children who watch the violent shows, even 'just funny' cartoons, were more likely to hit out at their playmates, argue, disobey class rules, leave tasks unfinished, and were less willing to wait for things than those who watched the nonviolent programs,' says Aletha Huston, Ph.D., now at the University of Kansas.
To conclude although I believe that TV can bring lots of positive effects and to spread out several positive messages we still have to be careful about what children watch on TV and for how long.
In the 1950s, television had a huge roll on society and became a way of living. This influence made appeared the birth of Cultivation theory. Sometimes referred to as the cultivation hypothesis or cultivation analysis, Cultivation theory was a theory developed by professor George Gerbner in the late 1960s. This theory suggests that television has become the main source of storytelling in today's society and that is responsible for our perceptions of day norms and reality. Cultivation theorists separate between “first order” effects (general beliefs about the everyday world, such as about the prevalence of violence) and “second order” effects (specific attitudes, such as to law and order or to personal safety). Gerbner also classified television viewers into two categories. Primarily the light viewers who watch television less than 2 hours per day and secondary the heavy viewers who watch television more than four hours per day. He predicted that heavy viewers would perceive the world as a more dangerous place because of the higher exposure to violent television portrayals.
Cultivation theory is an significant theory that effects different types of genders and ages of people. We are constantly influence not only by television but also by other media during our life, which can provide us with positive impacts but also with negative ones. Cultivation theory , like any other kind of effect, occurs inside a process of human social interaction in the way that what we see on television has the power to impact how we actually feel and act in the real world.
There’s a lot of concepts and terms that influence the way a media text is receveid by an audience. Those concepts and terms are Audience, Genre, Ideology, Institution, Narrative and Representation. Audience is portrayed by people who buy and consume media, it’s represented by five communication theories. The Hypodermic Needle Model, the Two Step Flow, Uses and Gratifications, the Reception Theory and the Cultivation Theory. Genre is the style of the media form and the key elements that may be referred to as paradigms are iconography, structure and theme. Ideology is ideas behind a media text that are represented by ideological discourse, preferred reading and oppositional reading. Institution are the companies who produce the media, and understanding institution is about understanding who produces media texts, what their set of codes and values is, and their relatives as individuals. Narrative is how the media text is structured, the human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. The narrative conventions are genre, character, form and time. Representation is how media produces and shows a thing to people. All Media texts are representations of reality, and they are intentionally compose by their producers and entirely artificial versions of the reality we perceive around us.
All these important concepts help the audience to decode the media text and to understand the message behind the story that is being told in the different forms that is being brought to the public. When constructing/analysing a text they need to consider who is the target audience and how they will respond to the text. And in that way, the message will be given with the exact form they wished.
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Children in their early developmental stages are very fragile and vulnerable physically and emotionally .they fail to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong and could blindly accept what they see on TV as facts upon which they base their future judgments. Children often like to imitate other and often do so with what they view on TV without being able to identify the consequences of their actions. We need to realize the harm this device could do to children in order to be able to modify the way we view the role TV plays in children's lives .we need to acknowledge the fact that children view TV more than any other media. We also need to realize that children use TV for fantasy, diversion and instruction. Children who are spending extensive hours in front of their TV sets are shield from the outside world. They fail to interact emotionally with other. A parent may walk in the door after being all day away at work and their daughter or son will not even left their eye to see them or run to them because they are so consumed by watching TV. The younger the children are the more effected they are because they fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and learn by observing and imitating.
http://mashable.com/2016/12/25/bedtime-stories-projector-kids/#I80Z5YlUHsqw
Nowadays, technology is a daily part of our lives. Now, more than ever we depend on technology to accomplish the simplest tasks.
This article talks about a new app for iPhones that allows children to watch their bedtime stories through a projector that is installed on their cellphones. It shows how to do it in a way that allows parents and their children the opportunity to enjoy their bedtime stories in a more interactive way. Although it is a simple way to keep the children entertained, I think children don’t connect as much with their parents as if they told them themselves. When I was younger, a lot of my memories involve my mother reading fairytales, making different voices and laughing with me. Besides the fact that it also helped me read better, it made me and my mother a lot closer and with a much healthier relationship. I also developed my creativity and my way of thinking since sometimes we made up stories or changed the ending so they became better.
I think that this app is unnecessary and shouldn’t be bought. You miss out on creating a bond with your child and still have to pay $35 for it. How is that fair? You need to understand that by exposing your children to this kind of devices and apps so young is robbing them of their childhood and of their imagination. Due to this exposure to technology children are becoming a lot more cynic and losing their ability to believe in magic and all of the things that make childhood something incredible.
The cultivation theory examines the long-term effects of television. Results showed that some people watch so much television that they start to believe in what they see and think that that is their reality.
Nowadays, children are put in contact in front of technology at an early age and that causes them to neglect the other aspects of their childhoods. When I was a child, I spent my days playing with my neighbors, skating and running after my dogs. Now, my cousin, who just turned nine recently spends her days glued to the television.
Another thing that children seemed to forget due to television is school. They arrive from school, eat and sit in front of the television doing their homework with only half of their attention on it. This causes them to retain less information, learn less and cause more mistakes.
Children also seem to have become ruder and more violent due to the programs that they watch, since most parents allow them to watch what they want and they start copying it. Children who watch wrestling, boxers or anything similar start to copy it and that can lead to accidents.
To reverse this, we need to learn not to rely so much on technology. Parents need to motivate their children to play with dolls and balls on their backyard, not on their computers or watch it on television. If they maintain a balance between the time they spend on the couch and the time they spend stimulating their brain and bodies they will live a much healthier and happier life.
One of key concepts in media industries and major element for any media producer is the audience (people who decode any media text) because all media texts are produced with an audience in mind. We are all involved with media as participants of an audience and nowadays it´s quite difficult to live without media in our life. There is a wide range of media studies and communication studies theories about the audience's role, studying how are their reception towards media and the effect media creates. One of that theories is “Hypodermic Needle Theory” that was one of the earliest ways to think about how the media affects the audience. In this theory, the information is directly injected in the audience in the way that mass media had an immediate and powerful effect. “The two step-flow theory” says that most people have their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders, who in turn are influenced by the mass media. “Uses and Gratification theory” is related with a set of needs, social and psychological that media have while they are consuming. This theory defends that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their desires and needs to achieve gratification. “Reception theory” suggests that when a producer constructs a text it is encoded with a message that the producer wishes to convey to the audience. They could decode the message in three ways: Dominant, negotiated and oppositional. “The cultivation theory” examines the long-term effects of television, whether and how watching television may influence viewer’s ideas.
Education changed a lot during the years, the way we are taught today is very different from the centuries before that. Nowadays, we still have a teacher that guide us through various programs and that give us a final grade. But the teaching methods were opposite than the ones we are used to. In the 19th century, there was a limited access to knowledge and information that today it’s given by us with books and internet. In the present, we have emphasis on process skils for a lifelong learning, we are taught things that can navigate us to a future job. In the past, teachers used print-based information that now, we have a multi-media form to learn in an easier way. Today, students have project based learning on team basis that can help them to prepare themselves to do their job with their co-workers. In previous times, mastery was demonstrated through papers and tests that now can be demonstrated through multi-media functions. The goals also changed as the years passed, in the 19th century it was to master content knowledge and in the 21st century it was to learn skills to solve problems. Mostly, in the past a teacher’s job was selecting and lecturing and in the present it’s framing and guiding. We can say that education is improving throughout the years and it will be very interesting to see what is the next development in the following years and centuries.