002. Me(dia)? Anxio(us)?

Have we become the bleak dystopia audiences have feared?

We all know how the media has focused online users (AKA Millennials) as: lazy, preoccupied, rude, arrogant. This generation is perceived as uncontrollable, gluttonous individuals mesmerised by screens with an unattainable lust for likes. All of this attributes to one truth: society regarding a dystopian outlook because of fears to new forms of media.

The dystopian perspective is nothing new. Every new media form inspired anxieties about it’s possible negative effects. Only consider:

• Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896 – “The unreal has about as much influence on them as the real…”
• George Orwell’s novel 1984 – totalitarian society monitoring everyone’s single move with camera’s and new technologies
• 1995 – Destructive video games considered unhealthy for kids
• Wall-E (2008) – A human dystopia/utopia; people looking at screens; are the screens the cause of their obesity?
• The End Specialists By Drew Magury (2012) – science’s evolution in creating immortality outlines the negatives in achieving eternity

“Research on the media’s capacity to evoke children’s emotions has focused on its ability to arouse their fears and anxieties.” Barbara J. Wilson on Media and Children’s Aggression, Fear, and Altruism

Accordingly, Wilson’s theory of children’s emotions spiked by the media is encouraged by Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment. This is in which adults punched, kicked and hit a large Doll while being watched by young children, who then were placed in the same room with toys. Many children copied the adults and preoccupied their time with punching the Doll instead of playing with the other toys. As such, this  demonstrated his theory of the “social learning of aggression.”

The exposure to violence through the media and its effects on kids suggests that violence viewed through a screen can have as much effect on an individual as if they were witnessing it first-hand.

Think only of new gifs, posts and articles wholeheartedly agreeing on the destructive nature of media as well.

Merely searching Huffington Post for social media anxieties and a variety of stress and fear rises. Additionally, new anxieties of social media include cyber-bullying, harrassment, social isolation, and anti-social behaviour.

These representations of new mass audiences include:

• Easily influenced
• ‘Feminised’
• ‘Childlike’
• ‘Passive’

Ultimately, fears about the ‘effects’ of the new mass media on the behaviour of children, the youth, uneducated, and the working class have arisen. But society uses technology to create both positive and negative things throughout history. It’s easier to blame the media than to find the ‘real’ cause of issues within a community.

Maybe it’s not the media that we should be questioning – but the ethics and morals of individuals.

Till next time,

Jess

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