They also see 250 ads per day.
Americans spend 2 trillion dollars a year on goods and services.
The teenage market alone is a 230 billion a year business.
We spend 20 times more on shopping than on education.
These figures bring up a disturbing question. How do we protect our children from this onslaught of buy-buy-buy and the mixed messages they see everyday?
Many people will say that the answer is to keep the product away from the kids. These ideas of "don't let children see the violence, buy the unacceptable music, play the violent video games or watch an R-rated movie" are impossible. Children are exposed to these messages no matter how hard the adults try to hide them. To compound the problem, we all know that hiding the unwanted message makes it that much more inviting and interesting for the children to have access to. When they do see them, they have no skills to analyze what they see.
Another, newer approach is Media Education. The student who is safest from the lure of these messages is the student who can assess and evaluate the message.
What is Media Education? All media has purpose-to entertain, persuade, inform or simply for propaganda. Each message is carefully created to portray the intended message. Because of their purpose they have a point of view. It is up to the consumer whether to accept or reject the message. Different people interpret media messages differently. What may be exciting and fun to one viewer may be scary and unacceptable to another.
The form of media contribute to their meaning. Listening to a radio report and viewing the same report on television can create two different opinions. A famous example is the Kennedy/Nixon presidential debates. Those who listened to the radio debate thought Nixon won while those who watched it on television felt that Kennedy clearly won. Media education, or teaching students to "read" the media messages and teach them to be able to decipher how or why the messages came across as they did, enables the student to make decisions based on their own values and not be swayed by the message itself. Much attention has come to the fact that there is a correlation between increased violence and sexism in the media and increased acts of aggression. The realistic answer to this problem is to educate our children. The bottom line is that sex and violence sell. As long as this remains true, it is not going to go away. We can, however, take some of the power away from these topics and teach our kids that real life and the movies are far different from each other.
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