Issues & Effects of Mass Communication

Video Transcript

"There is...there is potentially no area of our daily lives, of our social lives or our political lives, our romantic lives, our economic lives that is not at least potentially affected by mass media. We receive so many messages about so many different things, and for as long as we've had mass media, there have been a huge range of concerns about what media are doing to us. There's this assumption that media will somehow hypnotize us or control us or tell us what to do, tell us what to buy, tell us what to vote for, can make us violent, can change our sexuality. There are tremendous fears that people are vulnerable -- that media can affect anything they think about, anything they do, and as long as we've had media, we've had these concerns. In the 1920s, there was tremendous concern over films -- what films were doing to young people going to see them. And in the 1950s, it was comic books -- we thought comic books were turning all teenagers into juvenile delinquents. Since then, the concern is primarily focused on television. Does it make people violent, first of all? There's so much violence on television. We know from years of research, that 60 or 70 percent of all programs contain violence. Overall, violence is shown four, five, six times an hour, 30 times an hour on children's programs, so we worry about violence. We worry about being affected by the commercials, by political discourse, by all the people that are telling us what to believe, what to do, and how to act and what we should be. And so there's tremendous concern and tremendous amount of research has been done over the last 50 years on trying to understand exactly the ways in which these messages do affect us."