Saturday, March 28, 2009
music, movies, and video games
In class we talked about how people think that music, movies, and video games cause younger children to be delinquent. This may be true for some individuals, but when compared to all delinquents it has little to do with the acts that they commit. There are many other things that should be looked at in regards to why juveniles commit certain acts. We should not pay much attention to music, movies, and video games. We should focus more on the type of families that the kids are in and how they are raised. A girl in my critical thinking class did research on this certain topic, and she found in about five studies that music, movies, and video games have little to do with delinquency. Don't get me wrong some juveniles do commit acts that are caused by these things, but it is not the main cause of why they commit crimes.
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I agree that making any kind of direct correlation between juvenile delinquency and pop culture or mass media is a silly kind of an argument, but of course, scholars and lay people alike continue to make it. I am more interested in the question of racial stereotyping in the mass media and in popular culture, and again, although it is difficult to make an argument for a direct effect on people's attitudes and behaviors, I think a reason for concern would be that for so many whites in this country, the mass media and pop culture images are the only ones that they see. That is, because of the segregated lives that most white people live, where they do not go to school with black children, do not have black families as neighbors, do not work with black people as equals on their jobs, and do not have any or many black people as close personal friends, their only knowledge and experience of racial difference is represented by stereotypes, and that what is presented in the mass media is so far from reality and so biased most of the time, that there is little reason to expect that these stereotypes can be challenged or changed. If you are living a different reality, please tell me!
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