If you wanted to teach the youth of our country what values are most important, would you list fame as first on your list?
After conducting a 40-year study, UCLA psychologists have unfortunately concluded that, insofar as television programming goes, that’s exactly what is being done.
By studying two popular TV shows for young audiences once every decade, the researchers found that values like fame, achievement and financial success, values very minimally emphasized between the 1960s and 1990s, have taken over kindness, community-building and self-acceptance for highest on the list.
While the study chose programming aimed at 9- to 11-year-olds as their demographic, we should not make the mistake of forging a disconnect with the results because we’re in college. In 1997, most of us were in that exact range, and the last two decades are ones in which the most drastic change has occurred.
The consequences of a social atmosphere like this are far-reaching. Television and other media providers need to be held more responsible for the messages being sent to youth. For that to happen, research must continue to analyze media content and publicize the effects they find.
The conclusion of this particular research is undoubtedly a commentary on us.
It’s scary to consider that TV simply reflects culture and that we must now look at what widespread impetuses are driving such representations of American society. Yet while that’s obviously a worthy consideration, we can’t forget the reliable nature-and-nurture narrative.
Television is not just a reflection, but an affirmation ““ as it is meant to depict reality or some variation of it. TV serves a powerful role of socialization, a means of normalizing for audiences what the world must be like outside their immediate environments.
Because of the influential age range that the researchers studied, it should be of cultural importance that one of their most powerful sources of information for forming their world-views is emphasizing individualistic success while understating community, and even plain old kindness.
Since when is compassion so uncool?
And the unprecedented way in which media and technology exist in the lives of youth today presses this issue even further. No longer is viewing confined to “TV watching time.” In addition to the always sleeker and sexier box of metal and glass, we watch shows online, read about them on ads and tweet about our favorite moments.
This continuous expansion of our accessibility to TV only further increases its influence on our lives and more so on the lives of those exposed at such young ages, since the “millennium children” have been inculcated in this lifestyle even more than we have.
What’s more is that the changes in values ““ benevolence jumped from No. 2 in 1997 to No. 12 in 2007 ““ happened most drastically during the last couple decades, adding a layer to the results.
There is a correspondence between the exaggerated jump and the rise in social technology, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It has led our researchers to believe that the very nature of these technologies strongly influences the values that are communicated on television and that we embody as a culture.
After all, it wasn’t hard to agree with the study’s senior author Patricia Greenfield, UCLA psychology professor and director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Los Angeles, when she said that the simple act of having 400 Facebook friends is “intrinsically narcissistic.”
With a virtual, ever-growing audience, it’s easy to see why image formation and fame are so important. Constantly constructing representations of ourselves fuels a vain desire for more to see that construction, and so we displace quality in relationships with mere quantity.
This is supported by research, as it’s been shown how this same evolution in TV values and technology coincided with a drop in empathy in U.S. college students.
When celebrity and wealth replace self-acceptance and benevolence, what happens to the formation of our youth’s identities? What does such individualism do to our sense of wanting well-being for others, or even to our sense of seeing the connection between others’ well-being and our own?
I think there is incredible damage being done to the social unity that is so necessary for progress to be made in America, but the most responsibility lies with ourselves.
As active consumers, as people who turn on the television instead of taking the children we babysit outside, we have to gain awareness of the psychological dangers in letting the media do the upbringing.
And when we do depend on media, there needs to be a radical revision of what goals we communicate with our media intake ““ the consumers always get what they ask for.
Do you think we should improve our screen standards? Email Moradi at imoradi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu.