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Effects of the internet in our society
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Internet Desensitization: A Generation’s Downfall? Today’s youth have almost unlimited access to technology, and the Internet in particular. Though new technology has provided countless opportunities, and the ability to grow and make new connections, there are many fears and downsides that have been created by this virtual world. Through this ability, our generation is able to view anything, and are therefore susceptible to severe desensitization. Due to the omnipresence of the internet, the current generation, or “generation Z”, is desensitized because of the constant bombardment of incessant violence, degradation of sexuality, and a severe lack of consequences and empathy. These factors will negatively impact the future of society. The Internet is filled with grotesque images of violence – from gore websites, to “funny” videos involving graphic fights, and even news websites reporting on grizzly sites. Some of these things give teenagers entertainment and information, but at what cost to their minds? It seems that the Internet has created a new obsession with violence, but this fascination with violence is not new, as “the American psyche has… always been just as obsessed with violence as today”. The difference is that “viewers before the Vietnam era wouldn’t have been able to get their fix of it from film and television as they are now” (Nunnelly). Though many could argue that this new technology has no correlation to violent behavior, it has been shown in many cases that “violence in entertainment media is also considered by many to be a major contributor to aggressive and violent behavior” (Funk, 24). Earlier generations did not have the ability to gain access to violence as easily as “generation Z”. There is so much viole... ... middle of paper ... ..., and questionable or illegal activities” (Williams 66). These illegal photos and updates are becoming more and more common, as are incidents similar to the one at “Eden Prairie High School,” where 13 students were suspended for “posting photos of themselves consuming illegal substances on… Facebook” (Williams 66). The Internet is a place where teens can say literally anything, whether it is “all the crazy stuff going on,” or “disparaging comments on Facebook”, and they all think that there will be no consequences for it (Williams 67). With practically limitless access to anything present on the web, there are many worries that today’s generation is being exposed to too much. The influx of violence, sexuality, and little to no regards for empathy or consequences are creating a deep sense of desensitization that may last and strengthen in generations to come.
The article ‘Web of Risks’ by Brad Stone, is about how young adults misuse social media and there are consequences. Cameron Walker, a sophomore at Fisher College had organized a petition dedicated to getting a campus security guard fired and put it on Facebook. Marc Zuckerberg designed Facebook in 2003 and it is a well-known website used worldwide. On the Facebook page Walker wrote that the security guard harassed students and needed to be eliminated. His plan backfired due to his use of wording and it came off threatening so he was expelled. Social media is looked at as a way to express yourself. Different social networks are used such as Facebook, Bebo, and Myspace. On these sites sometimes personal life is published,
In an article written in the New England Journal of Higher Education, 2008 issue, by Dana Fleming, “Youthful Indiscretions: Should Colleges Protect Social Network Users from Themselves and Others?” Fleming poses the question of responsibility in monitoring students’ online social networking activities. Fleming’s purpose is to impress upon the readers the need for education institutions to state the guidelines and rules governing social networking, and “to treat them like any other university activity, subject to the school’s code of conduct and applicable state and federal laws” (443). She creates a dramatic tone in order to convey to her readers the idea that social networking can be sinister and their effects inescapable. Dana L. Fleming is a Boston area attorney who specializes in higher education law, with the mission of the New England Journal of Higher Education to engage and assist leaders in the assessment, development, and implementation of sound education practices and policies of regional significance. However, while Dana Fleming emphasizes the horror stories of social networking, she scatters her thoughts throughout this article springing from one idea to attempting to persuade her intended audience then juxtaposed stories about minors being hurt by poor social networking decisions contrasting the topic suggested in her title.
Higher education law attorney Dana L. Fleming voices her controversial opinion in favor of institutionalized involvement in social network protection in her article “Youthful Indiscretions: Should Colleges Protect Social Network Users from Themselves and Others?” (Fleming). Posted in the New England Journal of Higher Education, winter of 2008 issue, Fleming poses the question of responsibility in monitoring students’ online social networking activities. With a growing population of students registering on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, she introduces the concern of safety by saying, “like lawmakers, college administrators have not yet determined how to handle the unique issues posed by the public display of their students’ indiscretions.” However, while Dana Fleming emphasizes the horror stories of social networking gone-bad, she neglects the many positive aspects of these websites and suggests school involvement in monitoring these sites when the role of monitoring should lie with parents or the adult user.
When it comes to the topic of technological advances, most of us agree that they are beneficial to humans. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of whether or not Generation Z is at risk. Whereas, some are convinced that we have become cyborgs and are enslaved to devices that lie in our pockets. Others however, maintain that it can be both beneficial and detrimental. In “We Are All Cyborgs Now,” Amber Case argues that, although there are challenges with online socialization, being able to connect online helps to humanize us in new ways. In “Generation Z: online and at risk” Nicholas Kardaras disagrees, asserting that people with addictive personalities, particularly young people, are risking their mental health by favoring their online connections over their ordinary ones.
When families sit down to watch television, they expect to watch family type of shows. Family type shows meaning rated PG or PG13, sitcoms and movies that do not include weapons, killing, foul language, and non-socially accepted actions. When children killing, they start to believe that it is accepted. Do children think that killing and hurting others and themselves have little meaning to the real life, children can become traumatized. Most killers or violators of the law blame their behavior on the media, and the way that television portrays violators. Longitudinal studies tracking viewing habits and behavior patterns of a single individual found that 8-year-old boys, who viewed the most violent programs growing up, were the most likely to engage in aggressive and delinquent behavior by age 18 and serious criminal behavior by age 30 (Eron, 1). Most types of violence that occur today links to what people see on television, act out in video games or cyberspace games, or hear in music. Media adds to the violence that exists today and in the past few decades. It will continue in the future if it is not recognized as a possible threat to our society. When kids go to a movie, watch television, play video games or even surf the web, they become part of what they see and hear. Soaking violence in their heads long enough becomes a part of the way they think, acts, and live. The line between pretend and reality gets blurred.
According to John Davidson's essay Menace to Society, "three-quarters of Americans surveyed [are] convinced that movies, television and music spur young people to violence." While public opinion is strong, the results of research are divided on the effects of media violence on the youth in this country. Davidson wrote that most experts agree that some correlation between media violence and actual violent acts exists, yet the results are contradictory and researchers quibble about how the effects are to be measured (271). Moreover, Davidson is not convinced that the media is the sole problem of violence, or even a primary problem. He points out that other factors, such as "poverty, the easy accessibility of guns, domestic abuse, [and] social instability" may have a greater impact on a child becoming violent than the influence of the media (277). Even though other forces may be stronger, media violence does have some adverse effects on the members of society. If senseless violence on television and in movies had no effect, it would not be such a hotly debated topic. What type of effects and whom they affect are the most argued aspects of the discussion.
Tears begin to fall down a child’s face. Her body goes into shock out of fear. Her mother warned her about watching inappropriate content, and there it was, right on her computer screen. This could not have happened though. All she was doing was casually browsing the internet before a pop-up appeared. Although it may seem hard to believe, the major cause of events such as this is the lack of censorship on the internet. Internet censorship relates to the removal of offensive, inappropriate, or controversial content published online. The current problem with the internet is that there are few restrictions on what can be published or viewed. Several sites on the internet only offer a warning about inappropriate content that can easily be bypassed by agreeing to the terms. Other websites provide access to private or military information. More dreadfully, however, are websites that use their explicit content as a promotion. These factors bring the conclusion that anybody of any given age can view and publish inappropriate or dangerous content. The current problems with the internet serve for clarification as to why the United States should create a nonpartisan assembly to censor the internet in order to protect its citizens from the mental, emotional, and physical harms the internet creates.
“While most teenagers (60 percent) spend on average 20 hours per week in front of television and computer screens, a third spend closer to 40 hours per week, and about 7 percent are exposed to more than 50 hours of 'screen-time' per week”(Many Teens Spend). Many parents agree that they would rather not have their children view indecencies on the Internet and television, and the government should control the obscenities on the Internet. Others believe that it is the parent’s responsibility to control and censor what their children are watching on the Internet and television.
In Peter Tait’s article, “Preserving childhood innocence” he discusses how it influences the way social media has corrupted the innocence of youth. It is very easy to Google search and find anything in the blink of an eye. But, just because the information is readily available does not mean that it is a good idea to take advantage of it all at once. Parents often struggle raising their children in today’s society in which kids have much more exposure to content that is not age appropriate than the past generation had at their age. Today’s generation can be overstimulated by the kind and amount of information at their fingertips as they stumble upon it. Burdens of adult life are being unknowingly placed on kids who have not yet reached, or are just reaching, adolescence. This often leads to long-term negative psychological and social effects on children if they are prematurely exposed. Most information on the Internet is unfiltered which is often why it is often called “overexposed”. Without filtration, anyone can pull up inappropriate or false information without being aware of its inaccuracy. This includes anything from inappropriate pictures to hateful comments to uncensored language. When absorbed by a child who does not know how to self-filter the material, it can destroy the innocence that comes with being young. The kid no longer thinks like a child and is haunted by the
... girls being seen as sex objects and put on display online. However, it is important to approach these panics with a degree of skepticism because we must not forget that the young generation do have a mind of their own. If adults feels the pressure to monitor and restrict children from learning using new media, it could effect the way they learn and prove to be problematic.
The advent of the internet signaled a revolutionary shift for society, in which participation in massive amounts of information was easily and rapidly accessible to any connected country. This digital revolution gave rise to monolithic digital communities that dominate the web and strongly influence the globe; Twitter helped Belarusian youth organize flash-protests against their authoritarian government in 2006, while Wikileaks continues to serve as a public international clearing-house for whistle-blowers. But despite these resounding stories of success, concern is spreading that there is an underlying problem with our digitally enhanced society – especially in the western world. Widespread debate has been sparked by the digital revolution over modern technology's influence on younger generations, with experts combating each other over whether the internet is dulling or expanding young minds. This debate is not restricted to education, but extends to cover issues of morality and perspectives. Education issues are tied to lacking cultural awareness and political activism, but world-views are a separate and altogether more severe problem for the next generation. As the internet becomes more embedded in our lives, youth are retreating into the isolation of private social bubbles and turning reality into a remote abstract concept. Apathetic, amoral and disconnected youth in the western world are spreading to replace the active socially charged older generations.
The situation revolving around these sites is not likely to clear up any time soon; in fact, as freshmen enter higher education institutions, more activity regarding social networking will take place. Christine Rosen, “a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington” (2), said that the amount of freedom and control that technology gives us also provides a direct route for marketers to advertise products to these users. In addition, she says that college administrators use Facebook as a means of snooping around to find evidence of illegal activity of students. Many of these administrators and employers also create fake profiles in order to conduct these investigations, although, as spokesman for Facebook Chris Hughes says, creating...
When thinking of killing, drugs and nudity, I’m pretty sure not many people think of positive ideas. Electronics, such as television and computers, show these kinds of things regularly. Despite this explicit material, some people see the constantly improving technology as a wonderful addition to our lives. Yet as time passes, more and more people start to have doubts about what these developments in technology are leading to. Kids and teens should be playing and using their imaginations; instead they devote countless hours on various electronics ranging from tablets and computers to phones and TV’s. These inventions often show explicit and inappropriate material which corrupts children, and are slowly ruining society’s social skills.
Television violence, and media violence in general, has been a controversial topic for several years. The argument is whether young children are brainwashed into committing violent real-world crimes because of violent and pugnacious behavior exposed in mass media. In his article “No Real Evidence for TV Violence Causing Real Violence”, Jonathan Freedman, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of “Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression: Assessing the Scientific Evidence”, discusses how television violence, claimed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), does not cause real-world aggression among adolescents. The FCC determined to restrict violent television programming to late night hours only because their “scientific research” proves of increasing aggression among young viewers (Freedman Par. 2). Freedman goes on to explain that the FCC has no substantial scientific evidence stating that there is a correlation between fictional violence and real-world aggression among young audiences. He has completed research in 1984 and 2002 on the relationship between media violence to actual acts of violence on the street. Because he has completed research projects related to this topic, Freedman’s statistical evidence shows that there is a reduction in youth violence and it essentially does not cause real-world crimes (Freedman Par. 1). The FCC continues to claim that exposure to media violence does in fact increase aggression, and yet their readers continue to believe their fabrications. Freedman argues that people who research media violence tend to disregard and omit the opposing facts. No one type of violence is more effective on aggression than another type. There is no evidence showi...
Students ignoring school rules and policies students operating online often times forget the school rules and policies as they often times do not make the connection with social media and the school and the fact that anything posted on social media tools does have an impact on the school. There is also the risk of students posting things on social media sites that can have a negative impact on them in the future. For e...