Medias Influence on Adolescents

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Medias Influence on Adolescents

Introduction

Media is an undeniable part of human beings in the contemporary world. Many people find it had to live without using social media, but only a few contemplate the actual cost of using these media to themselves, and more so, to their children. Over the last decade, media platforms and outlets have gained popularity to the extent that even young people (minor) are conversant about navigating and operationalizing these platforms. Social media are like a two-sided coin; they have positive and negative sides. On the benefits sides, people can interact with more efficiency than it used to be before the emergence of different media platforms.

Additionally, the ideas that these media are used to enhance personal performance makes them accessible. For example, through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, among others, people can showcase their products and attract prospective customers. On the flip side, media can be criticized for the negative contribution to increased immorality in different communities. For instance, an increase in gender-based violence has a lot to do with how mixed media as they portray one gender being superior to the other. This report investigates how video games, television shows, and social media contribute towards violence as it related to adolescents. Media add to adolescent abuse by hosting contents that portray violence as 'cool,' causing many middle-ages youths to associate with it easily.

Video games

Video games, as an outlet media has a critical significance in society today. Other than educational and essential thinking lessons, video games also help users to recreate and reenergize. However, according to Dillon and Bushman (2017), over 80% of video game users are children (under the age of 18 years). This statistic proves a very disheartening situation where children not long take part in active leisure where they can interact and make friends from different cultures; a failure in this respect signals the possibility to adolescents' inability to tolerate each other leading to violence. Video games have a way of entertaining children, but with little consideration of the psychological implications of wellbeing. Dillon and Bushman (2017) investigate the effect of video gaming on children's mentality and opine that children are likely to develop a complex attitude toward violence as being an acceptable way of life. Take an example of a child playing online games the whole day; over time, such a child will have developed a misconstrued perception of violence. This outlet media has significant coverage considering that anyone can download video games from different platforms such as Android's Play Store, iOS's Apple Store, Desktop’s window, among other avenues of accessing video games.

Adolescents are no longer interested in 'soft' video games such as 'Candy Crush'; they are appealed by games that have extreme violent graphics such as 'Mortal Kombat,' 'Manhunt,' 'Dead Space,' among others. One of the critical features of these games is that they all portray the use of guns and explosive devices as an act of heroism. Bushman et al. (2017) contemplates a situation where children play such games for a long-time shooting zombie. This may lead to the possibility of perceiving...