looking at the big picture

In reading over these posts, everyone seems to have a lot of interesting perspectives and opinions on the subject of Media & Violence. It’s nice to see that we all can bring something to the table. And yet, while I’m aware that there are more and different aspects of this topic to be discussed than already mentioned, I feel the need to elaborate on a fellow students comment. I’m not ignoring the effects of media violence on our children, as I’m sure our class discussion will completely revolve around it, and because so, I’ve chosen to use my blog space as a means to point out a secondary issue that this topic brought up in my research and web searching. Jen posted her concerns that we are all so focused on the violence in the media and the effects it has on our societies youth, that we neglect the other issues that we should have with our children’s overall mass consumption of media, not only the violence within it. We begin to blame video games for violence instead of the actual crimes occurring on the streets around us. We think that it is the media that is projecting violence into our homes that is unavoidable. And, the fact of the matter is that, it is nearly impossible, despite all the parental controls on cable systems, browsers, etc, to have absolute control over the violence in all of your children’s programming from television or internet content. The control falls to the attention of the parent who needs to take a more active role in the entertainment and free time of their child’s life. Let’s say that we were able to have complete control and eliminate violence from at least two forms of media in your children’s daily routines (using Television and video games as examples). After we were through and had complete control over the violence factor, we would then have to move on and begin to focus on the fact that our children are still sitting in front of those media outlets and becoming unsocial, non-communicative and unhealthy.
See
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/09-04-2007/0004655823&EDATE=

the fact that gaming corporations have actually taken strides to effectively resolve the issue linked between obesity and over use of video games clearly shows that there are more issues when examining media’s effect on children than just the presence of violence alone.