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In Brief
- According to media researchers, adolescents frequently look to celebrity role models for guidance on fashion, attitudes and behavior.
- Kids who see a lot of drugs and sex on-screen tend to drink, smoke and become sexually active sooner in life.
- Consuming media in a social environment can mitigate its negative effects. Young people can gain valuable insights by watching or discussing troubling stories with friends or family.
Video games, movies and television, Facebook and Twitter—for a couch-potato child, digital culture is rarely more than a fingertip away. Young Americans spend on average about seven and a half hours a day with digital media. In fact, they often multitask, using many devices simultaneously to pack in some 10 hours and 45 minutes’ worth of content every day, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report. With kids devoting more free time to media than many adults spend at their full-time jobs, you would not be alone in wondering what they are taking away from the experience.
Of course, hand-wringing over how TV and the Internet are warping young brains is hardly new. Even for kids bedazzled by tweets and text messages, video—whether on a smartphone, at a movie theater or on an actual TV—still dominates the digital landscape. Indeed, recent studies show that children and teenagers develop beliefs directly influenced by the movie characters and TV stars they observe.
This article was originally published with the title Pop Star Psychology.
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2 Comments
Add CommentAm I the only person that has read the book "The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America" by Doctor Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey cover this phenomena quite extensively.
Summary:
Reality TV. Celebutantes. YouTube. Sex Tapes. Gossip Blogs. Drunk Driving. Tabloids. Drug Overdoses.
Is this entertainment? Why do we keep watching? What does it mean for our kids?
In the last decade, the face of entertainment has changed radically—and dangerously, as addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky and business and entertainment expert Dr. S. Mark Young argue in this eye-opening new book. The soap opera of celebrity behavior we all consume on a daily basis—stories of stars treating rehab like vacation, brazen displays of abusive and self-destructive "diva" antics on TV, shocking sexual imagery in prime time and online, and a constant parade of stars crashing and burning—attracts a huge and hungry audience. As Pinsky and Young show in The Mirror Effect, however, such behavior actually points to a wide-ranging psychological dysfunction among celebrities that may be spreading to the culture at large: the condition known as narcissism.
Before I go on a "Kids these days..." kick, I must admit that each generation has muttered those words. And it's true, we all have. Each generation can look at its youth and say, "back when we were kids", etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhenever I talk to my acquaintances about the cultural and moral decline of our society, I often get a response of, well, what I have in quotes above. They tell me that it's no big deal and it's just part of life.
Here's the question though. In the 1950's the media censored Elvis and his gyrating hips and Actors could not say the word 'pregnant' on-air. Seems silly now, right? Flash forward a couple of decades and our elders were shocked by the evil doings of Metallica and Megadeath, again, in retrospect; silly.
The point here is that we are spiraling down and exponential toilet. I'm 34, pretty astute with regard to what's going on in the world, and fairly laid back when it comes to topics such as this. However, I am repeatedly surprised of what I see in the main stream of current pop culture.
What is shocking to adults today would be vastly more shocking to someone who only made it to the 1950's.
The scary question we have to ask now is: what will shock our children? Whatever it will be, it can't be good.
Our celebrity-obsessed culture is breeding the idea of narcissism and the sense of entitlement into our youth.