The Way the World Really Works

Over and over in the past five years, I have talked to boys and girls who receive almost no clear messages about what the world is supposed to be from parents or friends. Frequently, a child has only one parent at home, who is often absent. The children can barely recall even talking with their parents about any subject beyond home life. Yet they have an ex­tremely well-developed idea of how the world is supposed to work. There is supposed to be trouble and danger, but it will all work out in the end. There is supposed to be action and excitement, but a resolution leading to calm. Force and strength gen­erally can be expected to solve problems. The people who trust in goodness and act honestly will triumph. These are the values of television.

If you ask a child who has seen nothing but chaos and disappointment in his or her own life just why he or she believes that things will turn out all right in the end — and if you push and don't take silence for an answer — you almost always hear a variant of, "Because that's the way it happens on 'Remington Steele'."

Although the children 1 talked to live in Los Angeles, none of them is part of the gilded world of television or movie production. Their parents are far more likely to be working two jobs each than to be inking million dollar deals at Paramount. Yet these young people are convinced that a larger, more glamorous world awaits them somewhere beyond Ventura Boulevard. When you probe for details about that world, the promised land sounds surpris­ingly like the countries of "Dynasty" or "Dallas" or "Family Ties."

In fact, many of the children 1 talked to are morally certain that the "real" world is much more like the world they have seen on TV than the one they can smell and touch. More bizarre still, many of them believe that the world of "Diff'rent Strokes" or "Miami Vice" is the real world, every bit as authentic and available as Van Nuys Boulevard or their own kitchens.

That is, when discussing life, these children talk about things that happen to them every day — fights with parents, car crashes, problems with school — and then they talk about events on "The Cosby Show" or "Webster" as if they, too, were part of daily life — as in a sense they have become.

Days of Their Lives

The more time 1 spent with these children, the clearer it became that for many of them, there is no longer any line between what is real and what is on TV. It is all one large sphere of experience — with television comprising by far the more compelling, coherent, accessible, attractive portion....

Television appeals to young people as a friend and a source of values, but it also tends to confuse them about what their rational expectations should be. That is. TV shows are so much more attractive as a way of life than the lives of the children 1 talked to, and the children are so unable to tell that TV is a fantasy, that they are both uplifted and saddened by TV shows. In a word. TV offers a better way of life, which encourages kids to believe life can be better than it is, but TV's way of life is also maddeningly unavailable.

"On television, no one is ever lonely, and no one's parents ever neglect them, and no one is ever bored, and no one ever gets left out. That's the way life should be," said the daughter of a broken home, whose stepfather routinely beat her when drunk. "Sometimes when 1 see how easy it is for Bill Cosby's kids, 1 get crazy thinking about my own life."

Another- student in Encino told me matter-of-factly that he measures his goals against the way people live on television. "If 1 can live even half as well as the people on 'Dallas' by the time I'm their age, that'll be doing really well," he said. "Even 'Falcon Crest' would be all right."

If mass culture on TV offers a coherent world view, is perceived as at least as "real" as reality, and is indeed considered part of reality, if it offers moral solace and moral structure, and also implicitly holds up standards for personal accomplishment to chil­dren, it looks — at least to me — very much like a parent. If children see the world of TV shows as part of their world, not as a fantasy separate from it, they will — and do — accept television's messages as part of the general wealth of experience offered by the world. Again, in the absence of clear family structure, meaningful communication between parents and children, and a well-ordered edu­cational system, TV rushes into the void with a world view packaged in living color, with pretty girls, handsome men, and great cars to make it more tempting — all at the touch of a button. Is it any wonder that such an attractive, teaching, moralizing, comforting parent is so appealing?

All of this offers an important, even crucial chal­lenge to us, the real parents, so to speak, in the society: If we have allowed a third parent to become part of our American family, we had better pay close attention to what the new parent is teaching our young about the world, and about us.

At the least, it looks as if that new parent has already taught our children that there is no difference between reality and fantasy. That lesson is definitely not going to help them or us.

Benjamin Stein, who appears in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, is a long-time observer of youth and mass culture.

 

I. Text Analysis

This is Not Your Life: Television as the Third Parent

1. What was the object and the result of the research which the author pursued earlier?

2. How does the present object of research relate to the previous one?

3. What hypothesis is his research based on?

4. Where did he try to find proof for this hypothesis?

5. To what extent do parents and TV form a child's view of the world?

6. How does the average child's real life experience compare with television reality?

7. What kind of values are propagated by TV?

Which findings verify Stein's hypothesis and how does he support his arguments?

II. Letter Writing

Write a letter to the editor of PUBLIC OPINION and comment on the hypothesis and the findings of Benjamin Stein

 

READING 2

LANGUAGE AND THE MEDIA

Introduction The media (usually understood to refer to the press, radio and television broadcasting) have become one of the most pervasive phenomena in our culture.

We can also add the World Wide Web to the list of communications media, but we will be dealing here mainly with newspapers and broadcasting media (television and radio). The aim of this chapter is to examine how our knowledge about the world is mediated through press and broadcasting institutions, and to suggest ways in which the analysis of language can provide insights into how that mediation can affect the representation of people, places and events.

The mass media have become one of the principal means through which we gain access to a large part of our information about the world, as well as to much of our entertainment. Because of this, they are a powerful site for the production and circulation of social meanings, i.e. to a great extent the media decide the significance of things that happen in the world for any given culture, society or social group. The language used by the media to represent particular social and political groups, and to describe newsworthy events, tends to provide the dominant ways available for the rest of us to talk about those groups and events. We will be looking here at some examples of these.

Lastly, as access to television and radio discourse is widening, more programmes, such as the ever-popular talk shows and phone-ins, are being dedicated to the ‘voices’ of the ordinary public, rather than limited to journalists, politicians and media experts. Also, with the development of the internet, a vast amount of information is now available from many different sources. But does this necessarily mean that a broader spectrum of people and opinions are being represented as a result, or do media institutions to a large extent still maintain control of who can talk and what gets said? We will also be addressing this question here.

The function of the media We use the media for many different purposes; for information, for entertainment and for education, through a range of programmes for schools as well 56 as university broadcasts. We listen to the news on radio and television for information about local, national and international events; many people spend hours every week being entertained by a variety of programmes from regular soap operas to weekly quizzes and chat shows. Sometimes, the boundaries become blurred between information and entertainment, and a new term has been coined to refer to programmes which serve both functions: ‘infotainment’.

Wildlife programmes, docu-dramas and the growing number of talk shows could all be described as having a dual role: to entertain as well as to inform.

There is also an ongoing debate about what television is for, often centred on the quality of programmes such as the popular ‘reality TV’ series Big Brother.

This kind of television gives us another kind of viewing experience, seen positively by some people as an interesting social and psychological media experiment, negatively by others as being voyeuristic and banal.

The mass media provide the means of access to much information and represent a potentially powerful force in our society. This is partly due to the fact that the media can select what counts as news, who gets into the papers and on to television and radio and, most importantly for linguists, the way that stories about people and events get told and the frameworks in which people get to appear and talk. However, we must be careful when talking about the media as powerful. Any newspaper story goes through several stages before it appears on the page, and many different people can be involved at each stage. The same is true of broadcast news stories. Rather than seeing the media as being a group of individuals who control and in some way manipulate what we read or watch, we need to think of each medium as a complex institution.

This institution is characterised by a set of processes, practices and conventions that the people within it have developed within a particular social and cultural context. These practices have an effect both on what we perceive as news and on the forms in which we expect to hear or read about it.

The media are always there, and have come to be taken for granted as an integral part of most people’s lives. Scannell (1988), in an account of the social role of broadcasting, argues that even the language we use to talk about television programming reflects this ordinariness, this taken-for-granted place in our lives. The expression ‘there’s nothing on TV’ has come to mean ‘there’s nothing I want to watch’, rather than describing an actual state of affairs where there is really nothing being broadcast if you switch on your set. The fact that, with the increase of twenty-four-hour broadcasting and multiple channels, there is practically always something on television is now quite unremarkable for most of us.

We should not be too quick to see the media as all-powerful, and the public as mere puppets of media control. The relationship is not a straightforward one. The reading, listening and viewing public can also choose not to buy, listen or watch; they can switch off, change allegiances and in some cases challenge versions of events. For example, as a result of the events surrounding the Princess of Wales’s death in August 1997, a new set of laws may be passed in Britain restricting the rights of ‘paparazzi’ journalists to take intrusive photographs, and this is due in some part at least to the public reaction to her death. On the other hand, the same public were always ready to buy the papers and watch the programmes that featured reports of her both when she was alive and after her death, and in that sense, the media were providing, and continue to provide, what sells their product.

READING 3

ADDICTION TO INTERNET ‘IS AN ILLNESS’

I. Warmer

addiction – a strong need that someone feels to regularly take an illegal or harmful drug:

There is a growing problem of drug addiction in our cities.

addiction to – a strong need or wish to spend as much time as possible doing a particular activity:

Many people have an addiction to nicotine.

His addiction to the Internet is taking over his life.

Source: Macmillan English Dictionary Online