Negative Effects of Electronic Media on

Society and Culture!

by Puja Mondal Media

Negative Effects of Electronic Media on Society and Culture!

Media often hypes the basic facts or information and presents them so as
to increase the superficial appeal of things. Media overemphasiss on the
money and glamour aspects, film stars, models and the successful men
and women in the fields of sports, business, art and politics.

The values it emphasises are materialistic; and the people who embody
them are largely superficial and artificial. As a result, the cultural values
that the media supports and which are taking root in society in modern
times are superficial and oriented towards money and glamour.
The fact is that be it television, magazines or the Internet, media is almost
omnipresent, affecting various aspects of our life. The products advertised
by the media, for instance, and the ways they are advertised are bound to
affect the practices of the people.
Consumerism is extremely prominent due to the cultural icons
represented through soaps, music videos and advertisements, along with
the willingness of adults and children to support such spending. This
seems to hold true as a characteristic of the emerging globalised,
television- and computer-based culture across the globe.
Television in particular has a major impact on the young, even toddlers, as
it influences their viewing habits throughout their lives. Television
violence is accompanied by vivid production features; children are
predisposed to seek out and pay attention to sex and violenceeven in
cartoons!
It is often seen that young girls and boys imitate their role models blindly.
The negative things the celebrities do are often talked about. The
controversies in the lives of the celebrities are often highlighted by the
media. This leads to a blind imitation of what appears in the news.
The negative effects of media in particular on children are manifested in
terms of their changing mental set-up and the declining quality of their
lifestyle. Children, who should invest their time in reading good books,
studying, playing outdoors, exercising and engaging in social activities,

today spend their evenings glued to the television.

The media that is easily accessible to even small children exposes them to
things they need not know and will not understand. Innocence is being
lost at an early age thanks to the film music and dance shows in which
children are encouraged to participate and imitate the attitudes and
actions of adults.
The negative psychological effects of media are seen in terms of media
changing the peoples outlook on life. Media have changed the cultural
and moral values of society. A majority of the audiences believe in what is
depicted by the media. Youngsters and children often tend to mix the reel
and the real world under the influence of the mass media.
Media also affects the physical well-being of individuals to a certain
extent. People spending hours in front of a television or surfing the
Internet tend to suffer from eye problems and obesity. Long hours of
media exposure add to the sedentary nature of ones lifestyle.
What it may result in can be termed a cultural lethargy of sorts. Culture
is an active and vibrant constituent of a society. It is healthy for the
society when it evolves with sustaining values, when it nurtures a lifestyle,
attitude and consciousness aimed at betterment of society in the long run.
Culture can be defined as a way of life which includes beliefs, aesthetics
and institutions of a civilisation. Considering todays way of life, media is
certainly an influential entity in our culture. Lately, media theories that
regard the audience as a passive entity have been discarded, and advanced
media theories take into account the audience response. However, despite
cognitive abilities of the audience, the media has been successfully
ingraining several values and elements into a large section of our society.

Although the programmes in the media reflect, the society we live in, at
times, they do much more than reflect the surroundingsthey exaggerate,
sensationalise and even trivialise what is of utmost importance to make
way for entertainment. The media creates celebrities; it creates idols.
A certain type of music or movies is made popular by the media. The
popularity of violent and abusive rap songs amongst teenagers can be
traced to media hype. The exposure to violence, drug abuse, sex and other
unhealthy habits has a major role in the outburst of unfortunate incidents
where children have got extremely violent and out of control.
Be it the advertisements touting products that embody cultural, racial and
communal prejudices or the television shows and films, which portray
violence, sexually explicit content and abusive language, they have a large
presence in our electronic media today, especially television.
There are music videos and rock bands that give out the message that
alcohol, drugs and sex are an inevitable, and enjoyable, part of life. These
ideals created by the media may not be appropriate, but, owing to their
apparent mass acceptance, more and more people accept them as a part of
todays culture.
The television has become an essential aspect of the modern lifestyle. At
the core of understanding how television affects society is the relationship
between television and consumerism. Television allows people to
consume images that otherwise most people would not have access to in
life.
While this might sound like a benefit, television is not simply about seeing
new and different things. It is primarily about selling. Television
programming has evolved hand-in-hand with consumerism first in

America in the mid-20th century, but increasingly everywhere else.

Television has spread the ethos of consumerism around the globe. It has
also spread voyeurism, a more insidious form of consumerism; in the way
it reveals what used to be private aspects of human life to public view.
In their turn, consumerism and voyeurism exert an influence over the
medium, so that there is a relationship of reciprocity between television
and society. The TV industries monitor this give-and-take by
sophisticated marketing surveys to tailor programmes to what they
perceive as the interests of their consumer-viewers.
Although people think that they are sitting at home watching the tube, the
tube is also, in a sense, watching them, and their viewing habits are traded
in the marketplace.
Television has created a sense of hyper-reality: the reality of television
seems to be more real to viewers than then real reality. This intertwines
with another feature of the television society: the simulacra copies
without originals.
Because the electronic images seen on the television screen look real, the
mind is fooledunless viewers constantly remind themselves that they
are not real, which spoils the viewing experience.
Viewers are fooled into living mentally and emotionally in a world with no
limits of any sort: a place whose origins are obscured and hidden; a world
in which long-dead people still make audiences laugh, and viewers are
disappointed when the reality they see does not correspond to the fiction
they see on the screen.
The growing popularity of mass media in all parts of India is encouraging

a homogenised Indian culture, whose cultural identity is becoming ever so

fragile.
Any sort of technological advancement, after all, has both its pros and
cons in the context of social change. Technological advancements,
especially the changing role of the mass media, have a lasting impact on
moulding cultural attributesways of thought, attitude and lifestyles.
Whether this impact is healthy or not from the viewpoint of developing a
culturally sustainable society is a crucial question.

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