INTRODUCTION

Watching TV, reading newspapers and magazines, surfing on internet are not just simple
habits through which we make ourselves comfortable in front of TV, we relax reading
newspapers, or find out whats on the news, play a game or chatting with our friends on social
networks and then our lives continue as nothing happened. Because the intensity of such kind of
experiences and the fact that they intervene in our lives from our first years of living, doubtlessly
influences the way we are. People get to think, behave, act, dress, speak and buy as mass media
suggest.
The huge influence that mass media have in peoples lives is one of the major themes
mostly approached in this diploma paper. So, the first part of the paper concentrates upon a
theoretical approach of persuasion and manipulation, and how these techniques of influence are
used by television and all kind of media. The second part analyzes the things which mass media
mostly promote and how sexuality, violence and stereotyping influence and even change our
behavior and attitudes. In this part I have also spoken about the so called consumerist society:
how and why people are encouraged to buy more and more products every day. Taking into
consideration the great amount of influence that mass media have on our lives, the third part
constitutes a solution to all these problems and offers practical advice for children, teenagers and
adults of how they should live with mass media. Of course that concrete examples from shows,
articles, commercials, movies, print press are used to demonstrate the theory according to which
the impact of the messages sent by media is very strong and leaves a deep print in our minds and
lives. Moreover, the final part of the paper is a pragmatic one, constituted by the results of an
opinion survey I have made. People from 13 different countries were asked to answer certain
questions in order to prove that mass media is indeed a means of manipulation and influence.
But as I said before, the purpose of this paper is not to criticize mass media, but to bring a
spot of light into our minds showing another face of how mass communication influence our
thoughts, decisions, attitudes, behaviors and in the end the way we are. Knowing these things, we
can at least protect ourselves against all the information we receive and we are prepared to
analyze it more realistically.

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 1. PERSUASION AND INFLUENCE

1.1. PERSUASION AND MANIPULATION THEORETICAL APPROACH

The concepts of persuasion and manipulation have a common sense even if they are seen
differently. But they have the same purpose: to determine the interlocutor or the individuals to
act in a way that the transmitter of the message wishes them to. I said before that these two
concepts are seen differently because people gave them opposed meanings. While persuasion is
perceived as being a good, desirable thing which is promoted by inter human and business
relationships, manipulation is seen as a negative dangerous and even occult method.
Persuasion is a form of influence. It is a method of argumentation through which a person
tries to convince another one or a group to believe or to do a certain thing. Thus persuasion is a
process of guidance for adopting certain attitudes or actions (which can be rational or less
rational), a process based on discussions and on attractiveness of presentation rather than on
using force. On the other hand, manipulation is another form of influence but only one part will
benefit after the other part has been influenced. For example, A manipulates or influences B to
make a decision, or to act in a certain way, but only A is the part that has real benefits after B
acted or decided under the influence of A. While persuasion is conducted under the next scheme:
A influences B to act or behave in a certain way, but in the end both A and B share the benefits.
In other words, persuasion is based on the win win principle, while manipulation aims for a
unilateral prize on one hand or emotional or material benefit on the other hand. Hence,
manipulation comes from the feeling of dominating the other / others - thing which might happen
using certain techniques through which ones reason and will is controlled and the other is
determined to act and behave against his will. Manipulation is the action, through which a social
actor a person, group or collectivity is determined to think and / or to act in a way which is
compatible with the desire of the initiator, and not with his own desire. This thing can be done as
I said before, using certain techniques of intentionally distorting the truth, but that leaves the
impression of freedom of thought and decision. The major difference between manipulation and
persuasion is that the influenced individual knows the intention of the one who uses the

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persuasion techniques, while the manipulated one is unaware of the intention of the person,
group or collectivity that uses the techniques in order to manipulate.
The common point of these two concepts is that both of them depend on language. And I
mean every kind of possible language: verbal language, nonverbal language which is consisted
of gestures, mimic, body posture and paraverbal language - intonation, intensity, voice pitch and
of course attitude which is very important. So used properly in a correct way all these elements
help persuasion and manipulation to reach their purpose. And for a better quality of persuasion
and manipulation, besides all these things, there are certain principles and techniques which must
be applied. Robert Cialdini in his work entitled Influence. Science and Practice, identified six
main principles of persuasion which may apply to manipulation, as it is also a form of influence.
The first one reciprocation according to which people give something in return to those who
treat them well, is more effective if people feel like they have actually received something for
free. So information, free samples positive experiences are examples to which people feel
indebted to answer positively. The second one, social proof, according to which people follow
the ones similar to them, is more effective if testimonies or personal examples are given to
people because when individuals feel insecure about a thing, they tend to follow the general idea
or the majority. Commitment and consistency is the third principle which Cialdini explains and it
says that generally people respect their own promises be them verbal or written. So if a person
agreed to something verbally, he is more likely to act as they said, than if he hadnt agreed at all.
Liking is another principle according to which people like the ones who like them and they prefer
to give an affirmative answer to what they know. So using similarities and peoples preferences
in influencing them is very effective. Authority means that people accept the experts opinions
and respect authority. Giving people detailed professional answers, business titles, business
clothes, or a white coat influences them a lot. And the final principle or method of influence
enumerated by Cialdini is scarcity meaning that people want what they can hardly obtain. The
rarer a thing is the more valuable it gets. So pointing out the uniqueness and losses is a really
good thing for people to accept the idea or thing that the persuader is trying to promote.
So we can see that both persuasion and manipulation are well targeted, volitional,
intentional and attitudinal behavioral structures used to determine another person, group or
community to act, behave and / or believe according to ones own purposes or ideas.

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 1.2. METHODS OF PERSUASION AND INFLUENCE USED BY MASS MEDIA

In this subchapter I intend to explain and give details about how the methods and
principles enumerated in the previous pages apply to mass media and why they influence us a
lot. Of course, concrete examples will be a main part of the study, because in this way we can
better understand how mass media influence our behaviors and attitudes.
The capacity of seeing the things of which we are surrounded of enables us to get closer
to reality because we know that the world exists due to the fact that we can see it. This thing is so
true that no one even thinks about doubting it. Hence, from all the experiences a human being
lives, the visual ones occupy a central place in our lives. TV media proves to be a door through
which a persons imagination is modeled, a door through which ones way of thinking is
reorganized. The effect of reality of the moving images, the annihilated doubts because one sees
with his own eyes, the dramatic, emotional characteristics of the TV programs are just some of
the features which make this thing possible. So we can strongly say that people believe what they
see on TV just because they can see it and that is enough. If they see the images it means that
they are true, because otherwise they wouldnt be able to see them. And so the effect of reality is
created, based on the idea that to show means to prove and what is proved is a truth. We can see
here that the principle of tautology according to which things we are shown are indisputable, is
applicable in this case. Most often for argumentation, people usually use the word I saw this on
the news or on TV considering that this is a sufficient argument to prove the validity and truth
of what they say. So moving images are based on this principle which seems to suggest not only
that to see means to believe, but also that it is credible only what we can see. Besides, the fact
that a lot of people can see the same thing in the same time and in this way a public opinion is
formed, is another thing that contributes to this fact, because people tend to believe the public
opinion, to believe what is generally recognized as being a general truth for everyone (social
proof) the well known spiral effect. (Gheorghe 2008 V. II: 51). All these things influence
people and their opinions and attitudes, because they tend to believe everything they see.
Moreover, the images we see on TV are strongly anchored in our minds and we will act and
move and dress and behave as we see the actors or models or people on television doing.
If someone finds this hard to believe, I propose a simple exercise that everyone can make.
Think about a book youve read and about the film version of that book. Is it true that the images

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that come to your mind are those of the actors which interpreted the roles n the movie? It is
normal because the moving images print in our minds, just as I said before and we take for
granted not the landscapes, events or characters we have imagined when reading a book, but the
ones provided by television. Our brain believes them because they are the things he can actually
see and forgets the things we created with our imagination because those are not seen, only with
our mind, not with the eyes. How many of us see in Rhet Butler and Scarlet OHara the actors
Clark Gable and Vivian Leight which interpreted the roles of the two main characters of the
well-known novel Gone with the Wind? I only gave this example and proposed this exercise to
make you see that the televised images have a strong impact on our minds. But if we remember
these images so well, arent we influenced by them? Arent we determined to behave, speak,
dress and act as this images suggest us? And let me answer this question: of course we are! Even
if we like it or not, its a fact. Moreover, the images we see have the power to substitute the ones
we see in real life. And I strongly believe this, because since Ive started this study, I interrogated
a lot of people and I was surprised to find out that people always remember first the things they
saw on TV and not the things they saw in real life. For example people who are fond of sports,
have in their minds images from TV even if they use to go on stadiums, racings, motor cross,
skiing, snowboarding, swimming etc. So we can see that the televised images influence us, even
if maybe they are not used with this purpose.
Strongly connected with the idea of images is the fact that for persuading a person, the
message you send has to be strongly emotionally charged because when an image or an
experience produces a strong emotion, this prints deep in our subconscious. The higher the
degree of affective involvement is the more the image will work in our subconscious and the
more it will be implied in the decisions we make. (Gheorghe 2008 V. II: 67). And the fact that
the impact of television is a strongly emotional one constitutes the secret of force absorption of
the televised world, because in front of the TV we experience love, hate, anger, pain, sadness,
thirst for revenge, thus all types of human emotions. All the spectator has to make is to choose
from all programs, the one which satisfies his / her inner needs, to watch and to abandon himself
/ herself in front of the experience that TV generates and in the future in real life to react and act
according or based on what he /she experienced. In resolving the family problems most of people
admit they remember how a similar situation was solved in TV programs and most often, from
many variants they can choose, they pick up the one seen on TV and apply the same methods for

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solving their problem. (Mander 1968: 255). We can easily see that television has a major impact
on peoples lives, and they are influenced in making decisions.
Print press also makes usage of photos to captivate and influence public opinion, because
the photographs make the articles more authentic. They are used both for informing, but also to
persuade as they are a representative scene which construct a meaning around the article.
(Marrou 2005: 23). For example when major violent acts usually happen, or big accidents take
place, mass media usually blame the terrorists, even before official research say it was a terrorist
attack. Photos of the victims and words used against Islamic people make readers form a bad
opinion about this people so it influences behavior towards them. See more detail about this topic
in the subchapter entitled Group Stereotyping. And this is only one example of how print press
influences public opinion.
Commercials are also based on human emotions in order to convince customers to buy
certain products, because one of the advertisements principles is to address to the target
costumer, making a connection with him by knowing very well his preoccupations, joys,
prejudices, and his habits, all in all his lifestyle. (liking principle) (Garfield: 2008: 116). Of
course that with so many channels for the viewer to watch and his possibility to change them,
commercials have to entertain, to seduce, to captivate, to be interesting, informative, convincing
and in the same time to be effective. So in the next part I will emphasize some of the main
techniques that commercials use in order to convince, influence and even manipulate our
choices. So as I said before, commercials are based on human emotions because in this way they
can persuade. The key of success for commercials is gaining by your side customers minds and
the hearts. (Garfield 2008: 84). So in this way, many of them take advantage of these emotions in
order to achieve their goal. Take for example McDonalds commercials which are based on the
relationship between parents and children, suggesting that taking your child to eat their products
makes them happy. Also, commercials for sweets and food spices are usually based on the same
concept. So in the first frame there is the family and in the second the products. People who want
a happy family and see the faces of smiling children believe that this could be effective also for
their own children and family, so they buy the products searching for that promise. A second
basic feature of commercials is that they have to be funny. In a world full of stress, with people
being so busy and always tensed, commercials have to bring a smile on your face, thus making
them more effective because they create pleasure and the viewers watch them because they are

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funny. But the more they watch them the more they become convinced to buy the product,
because repetition makes them be accustomed with products and with the idea that they must buy
it in order to be happy and pleased. The repetition principle suggests that the more people are
exposed to a thing, the more they are influenced to believe it and to accept it as being an
indispensable part of their lives. Thirdly, advertisements are sexual, based on the idea the idea
that besides the survival instinct the sexual one is the most powerful. And this is one of the
features mostly exploited by commercials. Even if the product doesnt appear in the advert and
even if the sexual context it totally irrelevant for that product this technique is quite effective and
influences the most, because people are attracted by sensuality. Take for example the next
commercial in the United States: a very sexy woman in a pool, stares at a very well built man,
with great abdomen, and a sexy body. What do you think it is about? A medicine called Lipitor,
recommended against cholesterol. So did you get the idea? In order to make a good impression
get rid of arterial fats. Speaking of pharmaceutical advertising we can strongly say that it
encourages over medication
Another means through which advertisements convince are statistic dates and half truths.
In this respect Bob Garfield one of the most popular commercial critics analyzes an example
through which he shows how commercials mislead the public opinion and convince the
consumers to buy the product. So he says that mud is a much richer source of iron than orange
juice. And this thing is of course true, but considering the fact that orange juice doesnt have iron
at all we can see how misleading this information can be. Orange juice contain C vitamin which
enables the body to absorb the iron of the other products. (Garfield 2005: 178, 179). If we
substitute the two elements in a commercial these half truths can easily convince us to make a
favorable choice for that specific product. And finally another method used by advertisement
executives is to mix promoted products with incomes offered to some relief foundations. This is
a very complex procedure as it mingles human emotions by showing happy old people or sick
children who need our help and the desire to help with the fact that it gives customers an inner
satisfaction that they contributed in making those people happy by the suggested idea that if you
buy the products, you can contribute to these people happiness. Behind all the philanthropic
actions there is a goal that aims for increasing sales. Is not bad to donate money for these
foundations, but using the image of a sick child to manipulate and stimulate this is a bad thing.
And people are actually manipulated to contribute to the well being of these people they see.

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Another way of manipulating our thoughts and ideas are subliminal messages often encountered
in commercials. Subliminal messages are any sensory stimuli below an individuals threshold for
conscious perception. Visual stimuli may be quickly flashed before an individual may process
them, or flashed and then masked, thereby interrupting the processing. 1 They are designed to be
intense enough to influence the mental processes or the behavior of the individual. Subliminal
messages firstly came up in the American society in 1957 when James Vicary invented a device
through which he could flash invisible messages into peoples minds. For six weeks, he showed
thousands of people the messages Drink Coca Cola and Are you hungry? Eat popcorn.
During this period, sales for Coca Cola rose with 57.7% and for popcorn with 18.1% (Kobilseck
2012: 4). These messages are used nowadays in many advertisements but they are too hard to be
identified, even if there has been made a commission of researchers to identify them. Many
people blame television for broadcasting commercials with subliminal messages, but they are not
to be blamed as they dont have the necessary equipment for verifying them and I believe that
neither time to do so. The responsible ones are the ads producers who consciously use them in
order to manipulate viewers minds.

1
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

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 2. THINGS MOSTLY PROMOTED BY MASS MEDIA AND THEIR ROLE
IN CHANGING ONES ATTITUDE AND BEHAVIOR

I will begin this chapter with two quotes from a Press Release which the President of the
United States of America, Barack Obama, made on the 9th of November 2005, in collaboration
with the Kaiser Family Foundation, discussing the effects of the television upon the childrens
education, behavior and attitudes:

We dont teach our children that healthy relationships involve drunken, naked parties in a hot
tub with strangers but thats what they see when they turn on The Real World. We dont teach
them to express their anger by seeing how much blood they can draw with a round of ammo but
thats what they learn in the most popular video games. And we dont teach our kids that the
height of success is inheriting a family fortune to buy Gucci bags without even working a serious
day in your life but thats how Parris Hilton gets by On the Simple Life. You can say that kids
know this isnt real, but when theyre fed a steady diet of these depictions over and over again
from the time theyre very young, this behavior becomes acceptable even normal.

In the same Press Release, President Obama declared:

And when eighty percent of African - American teens in a city like Washington think that theyll
be rich and over half think that theyll be famous, it hurts to hear them say that the path to success
lies with the loop dreams and rap careers glorified on television.

I have started the chapter presenting these quotations because I consider they are relevant
for the issues I would like to emphasize in this part of the paper, namely that mass media, by
promoting things like sexuality, violence, materialism and stereotyping certain communities or
people - have a strong impact on social perception and on individuals attitude and behavior. As
we could see by now, scholars started to research more and more these problems because we live
in a world when advertisements, movies, television, shows, internet and magazines are
indispensable for our lives and the message transmitted by media can be seen at every moment
influencing our thoughts, beliefs and way of perceiving the ones around us. In order to prove that

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I dedicated a whole subchapter for each of the most promoted things and argued how and why
they influence us.

2.1. SEXUALITY

The erotic instinct is defined by the Oxford dictionaries as being a thing related to
instincts, physiological processes and activities connected with physical attraction or intimate
physical contact between individuals. Sigismund Freud in his "Civilized" Sexual Morality and
Modern Nervous Illness declares that:

Further prospects are opened up when we take into consideration the fact that in man the sexual
instinct does not originally serve the purposes of reproduction at all, but has as its aim the
gaining of particular kinds of pleasure. It manifests itself in this way in human infancy, during
which it attains its aim of gaining pleasure not only from the genitals but from other parts of the
body (the erotogenic zones), and can therefore disregard any objects other than these convenient
ones. We call this stage the stage of auto-eroticism, and the child's upbringing has, in our view,
the task of restricting it, because to linger in it would make the sexual instinct uncontrollable and
unserviceable later on.

So as we can see a continuously exposure to sexuality from the earliest ages can only
damage and create people unable to control themselves, will create people who will want to
obtain pleasure no matter what, will create people to whom this kind of pleasure is above all the
other principles and aims one should have. But the sad thing is that sexuality is mostly promoted
in the programs or magazines for teenagers. And we all know that teenage is a difficult and
tumultuous period of life when the young person is forming an individuality and is seeking for a
model to follow. Nowadays teenagers seek to resemble the actors and models they see in mass
media as they experiment with different facets of their newly forming identities and try on
different social masks. Teenagers are vulnerable and very easily influenced by mass media
messages from two main reasons: first, their cognitive capacities are not that developed as to
critique and discern the message transmitted and secondly, as I said before, they are at the age
when they discover and develop their attitudes, they experiment their behavior in various ways
and they try to discover the right way to act in certain situations, they discover and form their

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personalities and their beliefs around gender roles (Strasbourger 1995: 213). More than that,
they are affected because teenagers spend a lot of time watching TV or surfing on the internet, so
this is another reason why they are very vulnerable at the mass medias message.
So, if we take into consideration the fact that in the last decades the TV programs with
sexual content increased considerably we can only imagine what kind of people and what kind of
perception they will have concerning this matter. Strasbourger in his Adolescents, Sex and the
Media says that:

Sex (the commercial networks seem to be telling us) is good for selling everything from
shampoo, office machinery, hotel rooms and beer to prime time series and made-for-TV movies,
but the product that would prevent the tragedy of pregnancy, condoms - must never darken
Americas television screens. (p. 221).

This is the situation nowadays, because sexuality brings a lot of profit in the
advertisement industry and this made the phenomenon expand so much in the last few years that
now everything is full of sexual content: from commercials, movies, shows, print press -
everything. But it hasnt always been like this. Lets take a brief look at the theme of sexuality as
it has been treated in mass media. In the 50s, Lucille Balle the protagonist, from I Love
Lucy, remained pregnant and the other characters and workers were forced by the leaders of
CBS not to use the word pregnant because this could make the viewers of the show to imagine
a man and a woman having a sexual relationship. (Streitmatter: 2006, 9). I am not saying that this
kind of extreme behavior is correct and I am not suggesting that mass media should take such a
position against this theme. All I am trying to illustrate is the difference between what morality
meant in those days, if you want and what morality of modern era is. And also I would like to
point out that mass media took a very important role in contributing to the Sexual Revolution.
And I would like to concentrate upon all types of media, but especially on television as it is the
one with the most powerful influence upon the society. So in the 60s the discovery of the
contraceptive pill was a scientific miracle that mass media, especially print press, promoted so
much that it directly led to the explosion of sexual relationships outside and before marriage.
Even if the Catholic Church and the Government opposed this manifestation of the press it still
continued to speak more and more about the miracles and the benefits of the so-called magic pill,
the benefits that it brings for women who dont have to be afraid of an unwanted pregnancy that
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it was soon adopted as a method of contraception, not as a pill for treatment for women who had
certain problems. Famous magazines like New York Times, Fortune, Newsweek, and others like
Mademoiselle, Ladies Home Journal, Readers Digest illustrated so much the benefits of sexual
life without responsibility that it literally led to a sexual revolution. (Streitmatter: 2006, 23). So
themes which were condemned by morality were developed now with so much zeal and people
bought so much the magazines that spoke about these themes that it led to a profitable business
for those who dared to treat such themes of sex and sex before marriage illustrating the benefits
of such a life. Also it led to the independence of women, because for the first time, she had the
opportunity to have both a good job and sexual activity, thus escaping from the role of
housekeeper she had till that moment. Only a few years later, images with completely naked
gorgeous women appeared for the first time in print press and mass media. Playboy, a magazine
based on the idea that sex is way too beautiful for being limited by marriage was the first to show
these images. And taking into consideration the number of magazines sold which was enormous
due to the fact that at that time it was a shocking thing to expose like that a womans body, we
can only imagine the effect it had in the society and upon the sexual behaviors. Being such a
profitable business, other magazines like this followed the example of the founder and so, the
well known Penthouse, appeared on the scene. And after this, the newspapers started to insert
sexual photos in the pages and to speak about subjects which were considered taboo. Also in
movies women were presented more and more sensual and sexy which forced the Church to
accuse television of immorality. But even if there were vehement opposition, movies continued
to promote these images (not naked bodies only sensual and sexy women at that time), because
the most rated programs and movies were those who had sexual content.
In the 70s this sensual approach was made clear even in music, once with Jim Morrison
and his band The Doors promoted a free sexual life and who was even condemned to prison for
immoral behavior during his concerts. The 70s also are significant for another shocking thing,
once with the appearance of Cosmopolitan the first magazine foe women, who presented male
nudes and speaking about sex from womens point of view. Further on, the 80s represent a
period in which all the barriers were broken. It all started with a very controversial commercial
launched by Calvin Klein, in which a model of only 15 years old presented a pair of jeans in very
sensual sexy way, saying Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? and after a

15
short break she says Nothing2. But it had a really sexual context and taking into consideration
that the model had only 15 years old it was a real scandal. But it proved once again that sexuality
influences the society and it is a profitable model to use, because an year before the apparition
of this commercial, the sales were of 50 million dollars and at aonly an year after, Calvin Klein
sold jeans of 200 millions. (Streitmatter: 2006, 131). This was the first time when sexuality was
used in commercials. It was the same Calvin Klein who firstly used a man in his commercials, in
the 80s, continuing to shock the public by introducing the male model in commercials 3. The
perfect body of the Olympic Champion, Tom Hintnaus was exposed almost naked for promoting
the businessmans underwear in 1982, also creating a new model for the perfect American man
the man without hair on the chest, being the first man who appears in this posture. The result:
shortly after, well shaped perfect men were used in commercials and advertisements for all kind
of products: watches, tooth paste, soaps etc. this time showing men as a sexual object and now
women were encouraged to treat men like this thus becoming independent and free to enjoy sex
as they do. The star who took music and womanhood to another level in this period was
Madonna, a very controversial figure at the time, especially for her sexual libertinage. She was
much critiqued but I dare saying that even if she was and continues to be like that, she had her
merits. She was the first star who educated nation and the world, speaking, singing and making
tournaments with themes like safe sex. This happens in the context in which people enjoyed so
much the freedom of intimate relationships that most of them had AIDS and lots of sexual
transmitted diseases. But mass media refused to speak about methods to stop AIDS and HIV
from spreading. So she was an example contributing with funds and donation in order to help
scientists in finding a treatment for these diseases. She was the first one who did this and who
spoke publicly in the American society about this reality of the time. Shortly after lots of public
figures started to donate money for this cause contributing and wanting to help the scientists in
stopping the viruses that killed so much people.
After this big step and when people got accustomed with talks and shows, music, movies
and commercials filled with sexual content, the 90s were even more drastic, as they correlated
sexuality with violence offering a new dimension of this issue. Movies like Fatal Attraction,
Jungle Fever, and many, many others illustrated exactly this theme. Music was full of violence

2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK2VZgJ4AoM
3
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/ck-tom-hintnaus/

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against women correlated with sex and furthermore, homosexuality appeared on screens in
serials like Will and Grace. I have tried to emphasize very shortly how mass media contributed a
lot to this situation nowadays, expanding little by little the sexual context. And nowadays, shows
and serials like Sex and the City seem so normal for us that we dont stop to evaluate the effects
of this kind of programs, commercials, movies or articles and how they influence our lives. And
treating the situation as it is today in the media I would like to analyze a little exactly the effects
of so much sexuality upon the society.
The statistics made on a few thousands of all types of TV programs shown that 64 % of
them contain materials concerning sexuality, in 61% take place discussions about this subject
and in 32% appear clearly sexual relationships (Gheorghe 2005: 257). On television each year,
American children and teenagers see nearly 14000 sexual references, innuendoes and behaviors,
few of which (less than 170) involve the use of birth control, self-control, abstinence or
responsibility. (Strasburger 1995: 45). Also, the risk of contaminating a sexually transmitted
disease and the responsibility which sexual life supposes are very little approached subjects.
Instead, sexual relationships between unmarried couples are very often presented especially in
soap operas where these kinds of involvements are 24th more frequent than those between
husband and wife. The protagonist is usually presented as being impersonal and exploiter of the
partner who is usually a woman, regarding her just as an object. On TV the characters involved
in a sexual relationship almost never catch a sexually transmitted disease even if in real life one
of six persons risks to get contaminated with such one. These are general specific features of the
sexuality promoted by TV. Generally speaking, everything which is tied up to this subject that
appears on the screen is wrapped by sensational, by sentimentalism. But in the same time is very
little personal, all being reduced to carnal satisfaction rather than a deep relationship. We can see
that the intimate relationship between partners are not planned, but the fact that they are swept
away in the sexual intercourse in a natural way is very much popularized creating an impression
of authenticity.
This way of treating sexuality like that has serious impact over the public because those
who watch TV believe that sexual relationships outside marriage, the rapes and prostitution are
more spread, more common than they really are. Concerning the youth, they overestimate the
number of those of their age who already started their sexual life. So, watching TV inoculates
teenagers the idea that everybody did it and this contributed in the last twenty years to a

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gradually, constant lower of the age of which boys and girls have their first sexual contact. As
they do not understand that this kind of relationship includes also some responsibilities, it has
been recorded that in the last years the teenage pregnancies are more and more spread and this
also leads to an increasing of the number of abortions. And according to the statistics, The
United Stated is a leader in all western nations concerning abortions and pregnancies at early
ages. Also people who intensively watch soap operas believe that the number of divorced
couples and of those who have illegitimate children is much higher than in real life. (Gheorghe
2005: 60). It is well known that people tend to line to the public opinion, to fashion, to behaviors
that are considered desirable at a given moment. So we can anticipate which will be the effect of
this pseudo-vision upon the reality that TV creates in the adults and teenagers minds. In the
teenagers groups (schools and high schools) the shame of not being as everybody else
determines boys and girls to declare that they are not virgin even if the truth is another one,
hence making others believe that they are not in fashion.
So the TV world is sufficient to reconstitute the societys values and to recreate a new
normality through its mixture with reality. The sexual relationships before marriage, the
adultery and the illegitimate children are regarded as desirable, normal realities, becoming
models of behavior for the new generation. Sexuality promoted by television has always a happy
ending, where pleasure wins after all, where there are no consequences of dissolute sexuality. It
is a world with ideal, powerful, attractive partners full of charm, always self confident, without
having the weakness or the imperfections of an ordinary man. In this context when people will
return to real life, different than the televised one, they will be frustrated that their partner is not
as perfect as the ones in the TV. Boys and men feel frustrated because they do not correspond
with the models they see in on TV or in any kind of media as the well-built physical appearance
is mostly popularized. It results that the reality constructed by television is a world of selfishness,
of fake sentimentalism where the heroes are exploiting their partners, where love is reduced to
carnal pleasure. Hence love shown on TV is tightly connected with the appearance, with the
beauty of the body. All these features have serious impact upon the attitudes of those who
intensively watch TV because girls in real life make a great deal about how they look like and
they take as models, the skinny actresses or models, mostly promoted by mass media so taking

18
into consideration that girls become weight conscious at the age of 8 9 years old it results that
80% of the girls these age are on diets and that eating disorders have grown 400% since 19704.
Another series of consequences brought about the sexuality of the TV programs are
reflected in the family life. Even if they seem to be less perceptible on short term, they
intensively mark the life and mentality of modern man. Normally family values are contradictory
with pornography. But the studies have shown that long exposures to sexuality leads to a large
acceptance of promiscuousness both at men and women. They become to consider this behavior
as being normal and so the infidelity between partners increases. People watching scurrilous
programs declare that they would easily accept sexual relationships outside marriage. Only
38.8% of the people exposed to pornography agree that the institution of marriage is essential for
a good working society, comparing with 60% of the people who do not watch this kind of
programs (Kubey 1966: 6). It results that the desire of having children or getting married is
lowering at individuals who watch programs with intense sexual content. These (family and
children) are regarded as obstacles in obtaining pleasure. Also, the rate of divorces increased in
the last few years precisely for this reason. People look for superlative sexual satisfaction,
pleasures which are available without emotional investments, without social obstruction and
without emotional duty. From this perspective the immediate satisfaction offered by commercial
television in opposition to stability and engagement values so necessary for a healthy family life.
Thus, pornography is a result of impersonal sexuality, sex only for pleasure. The
appearance and the development of such kinds of programs in contemporary media, especially in
TV called the scientists attention because of their meaningful effects. There are studies which
prove that coprology increases aggressiveness, that there is a connection between pornography
and rape cases and men who watch this kind of programs, easily accept violence and mockery
against women. (Gheorghe 2005: 276). There are large private collections of bawdy materials
found by authorities in the dwellings of those arrested for sexual crimes. Also children
aggressors use explicit scurrilous materials before and during their attacks. (Kubey 1996: 7).
Thus, being exposed to the prevalent erotic message of TV or just living in the middle of a world
that moulds its values and attitudinal system after the televised world, the modern man cannot
perceive love and sexuality as they were before the TV era. Even if one considers himself /
herself infallible because of his / her education, intelligence or power of discrimination, in

4
see http://www.education.corn/references/article/how-much-sexual-content-media/

19
function of the time allotted to watch TV, he / she will become more libertine concerning the
relationship between man and woman and the unsuitable sexual behavior. He / she will feel less
coherently to the family or to the idea of making one, less willing of having children; he / she
will become negligible with his / her wife / husband, his / her friends. In this way, the modern
man is easy to be influenced and manipulated, become more frustrated, more unsatisfied by the
others and by himself, lonelier and unhappier, because in the world in which television was
born (occidental world) over 70% of the marriages fail into divorce. (Gheorghe 2005: 284). Till
now we dealt a lot with television because generally speaking people spend more time watching
TV than they spend on the other sources of information, but the other type of media shouldnt be
passed away either, because it has also a great role in changing mentalities, attitudes and
behaviors. Music videos contain more sex per minute than any other compelling media genre and
we can all check the music channels in order to be completely convinced about that. And
speaking about music we can also mention here the lyrics of the songs, which are also very
sexual. Stars like Christina Aguillera, Lil Kim, Britney Spears, promote sex for pleasure and
instigate through their verses that women should treat men as sexual objects. Rap music is also
very important in this case as it sends exactly the same message, but this time for men to treat
women as such.
Print media is changing in the last decades, scholars say, adapting and exploiting the
same issues as the television and movies do. So in print media there has been observed an
increasing of sexual subjects, especially magazines changing their views from sexual morality
to sexual quality. Thus, articles such How Smart Girls Flirt, Sex to Write Home About,
15 Ways Sex Makes You Prettier, Are You Good in Bed? are commonly found in magazines
for teenagers and not only. But instead television, magazines have a positive part, namely that
they also deal a lot with issues such as health problems and contraception methods, but still, half
of their content is consisted of sexual information. And finally we deal with advertisement and
commercials which are the most sexual charged from all the media. We can identify slogans like
you can learn more about anatomy after school in a commercial about jeans, where a boy is
groping a girl, or the well known slogan just do it or dont be a fool, vulcanize your tool,
wrap it in foil before checking her oil and the examples may go on and on. And we can see
that commercials and advertisements are more sexual than any kind of other media, because as I

20
said before, sex sells everything nowadays. Even products like, water, perfumes, sweets, clothes
are all sexual, as we can see in the following examples:

21
 Concerning the internet we all know how many sites there are which promote sexuality.
At the beginning when internet has been discovered it was a wonder because it gave people the
opportunity and the commodity to watch their favorite things whenever they want. They didnt
have to go to rent porn DVDs and to be embarrassed when going to pay, they could enjoy this
type of movies and videos by remaining anonymous. But for the young generation the internet is
a prime source of information and teenagers get their information without checking if it is correct
or not. And they use it especially for obtaining information related to sexuality preferring it to
teachers and parents (who provide restricted information and pictures) because they can obtain
the whole information and they satisfy their curiosity. But most of them complain that they are
exposed to sexual images while surfing or while making homework even if they dont want it.
And the curiosity at this age pushes them to watch more photos or related videos. Teenagers
easily can watch sexual photos and scenes, because it is very hard to control them. And the sites
for adults show explicitly sexual images to attract the client before asking for payment, so you
dont necessarily have to be an adult in order to see images with sexual content. I suggest you to
make a test. Write on Google simple words like sex or boobs or things related to this and
you will see how many results you get. So in less than 10 minutes children and teenagers can
easily satisfy their curiosity. More than that, on the internet there is sexual solicitation and I am
sure that all of us who use internet observed these things or had this kind of unpleasant
experience. As a result to that we now see on the social networks like Facebook, Hi5, Twitter
what kind of photos the young girls are posting. And I have chosen from the list of my friends
from these social networks a few photos to prove that the influence of all this sexuality becomes
more and more obvious:

C. C 19 years old L. C. 20 years old G. P. 18 years old

22
 C. M. & L. T. 14 years old C. D. 19 years old

T. A. 21 years old A. P. 20 years old

2.2. VIOLENCE

Besides sexuality, violence occupies one of the most important places on TV channels.
Even if in the last 50 years this phenomenon provoked lots of public debates, criticism and
sanctions, television continues to promote more and more violence. The fact has a really bad
influence upon the society because the violence promoted by media is responsible in many cases
for the one in real life. And if we consider that half of Americas population detain guns and that
in this society there are enormous rates of rapes, crimes, domestic violence, child abuse, murders
and a lot of people who hide inside themselves racial resentment we can only imagine the effects
of violence so much popularized by media:
- it facilitates / eases aggressiveness and antisocial behavior
- it develops the insensibility to violence and to its victims;

23
 - it intensifies the TV spectators perception that they live in a dangerous world in
which they might become victims (Gheorghe 2005: 287)
Thus, a long exposure to violence causes the appropriation of a physically and verbally
aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts and aggressive emotions. This is why after about
fifteen years since the introduction of the TV in America the number of homicides and stealing
doubled. These effects are clear only after fifteen years because this is the time when a
generation becomes mature. Here are some arguments why television has an important role in
this process:
- the numbers of homicides firstly increased in towns and cities and then in rural
communities (because television was introduced for the first time in cities and later
spread at villages)
- the number of homicides firstly increased in white communities (because the
minorities couldnt afford to buy a TV)
- the delinquency aroused first in those regions where TV was introduced sooner
(Strasbouger 1995: 20)
The link between delinquency and the violence on the screen is proved by Grand Handrik
who interrogated 208 federal convicts. He reached the conclusion that 90% of them learnt
criminal tricks and improved their techniques by watching TV and 40% declared that they copied
exactly the crimes which they saw on the screen in the movies with such content. (Murray 2009)
It is well known that people tend to identify themselves with the actors and the characters they
see and the situations these characters are involved in. It may be possible that the ones which
have an innate aggressive character might look at these figures and to try to justify their own
aggressive behavior. But the certain thing is that this perception of realism and identification
with the situations and the characters influence a lot the social perception about the world and
their own attitude. And the effects are obvious in real life. The well known Colorado massacre,
which took place in 1999, where two students have murdered twelve of their classmates, one
teacher and themselves, illustrate that movies and cartoons with a high rate of violence damage
the teenagers personality and behavior. And this is not the only case of such behavior. In 2007 a
much more tragic thing happened in Virginia. One student killed 2 girls from the same school,
and after two hours he returned to college and killed 30 students and one teacher, wounded 17
students and then he killed himself. The most recent and the most dramatic shooting happened in

24
2012, on December 14, in Connecticut, where twenty-seven people were shot deadly in an
elementary school. And the examples might go on and on, but I have illustrated the most tragic
episodes which I can remember since 2007. It is no wonder that these events take place as
teenagers and children are taking examples from the actors they see in movies. And growing up
in such an environment where mass media promote violence so much without actually pointing
out the effects of such behavior, growing up with the idea that society is bad, that people are
dangerous, that the only solution in difficulties or conflict situation is violence - makes teenagers,
children and adults being spiritually damaged as they dont really understand the harm and
suffering they provoke adopting an aggressive attitude. And we can treat this problem
superficially and say that these people are sick and this is why they act like this; we can close our
eyes and go on; we can point out our fingers and judge the bad parenting, or we can take a closer
look at what is happening around us and find inside us the force to eliminate the bad from its
roots. I have mentioned the bad parenting because nowadays in our society, where usually both
parents work, children and teenagers are left to educate themselves, and they take mass media as
educator. Parents try to offer their children the best things, materially speaking, but they often
forget that education is far more important than these things. So, if in such kind of society, where
media is actually an educator and sometimes even more, a friend for the teens, the violent
message which is transmitted will be entirely adopted by the young people and not only. Lets
take for example some movies like, Natural Born Killers in which the main characters twelve
murderers sustain that choosing people randomly and killing them, offers you a great feeling. Or
Seven, in which there takes place a contest of killing in the most unusual grotesque way, or The
Basketball Diaries in which a young boy kills repeatedly his classmates in a high school by
methodically guns down whimpering, and oh, yeah, lets not forget that he always smiles when
he kills and analyze the message they transmit: that killing is funny and offers pleasure and it
hides the responsibility and the effects of such actions.
But teenagers are not the only ones influenced by violence. Also the childrens behavior
and attitude is seriously formed following the violent scenes which they are used to watch on
TV. Cartoons contain more violent scenes than an ordinary movie and often promote an
antisocial behavior. For example children who watch cartoons like Spiderman, Batman,
Superman, Pokemaon, Powerpuff girls, X Men, Ben 10, Transformers, Thundercats and others
similar to these have a more aggressive behavior than those who watch Mr.s Rogers Neighbors

25
for example a program which promotes a cooperation and sharing the things that you have with
others. The number of crimes committed by children in USA between 1984 and 1992 increased
from 987 to 2300. This phenomenon is colligated by the researchers with the violence on the
screen. There are numerous cases in which children kill without having a motivation. They just
mimic what they see in cartoons without being aware of the consequences, because they dont
have the ability to distinguish the reality from the fictional world they are exposed to. (Murray:
2009). And if we take a brief look at some scenes from the most popular cartoons we can easily
understand this abnormality, namely the predominant aggressive attitudes we identify at children
nowadays:

X Men Transformers

Thundercats Kung Fu Panda

26
 Earth Defenders

As we can see, the major feature is destruction, violence, use of guns. And as I said
before, in a society where half of people have guns, and where aggression and violence threatens
every step, if the peoples minds are fed up with even more violence, we cant expect a good,
calm, understanding behavior. It may seem unbelievable that simple cartoons or innocent
movies really influence that much the attitudes and behavior of the TV spectators. But television
is indeed responsible for the creation of aggressive individuals. The fact that over 57% of the
broadcasted shows contain at least one form of violence, the fact that on important channels (like
HBO for example) the rate of violence reaches 87%, the fact that only 13% of the realistic shows
present the alternative to violence or how it can be avoided and only 4% of the shows have a
strong anti violent character prove this thing. Moreover at rush hours, the television promotes a
1000 higher ratio of violence and delinquency than in reality (Murray 2009)

27
 Concerning the suicidal acts, their number enlarged considerably in the last decades
especially in the regions where television was introduced first. The most dramatic suicide acts
that have a big impact over the public (especially over women) are those presented in soap-
operas. Every time when a character from a serial committed suicide, during three days after, it
has been observed a considerable increasing of the number of self-slaughters at women. (Philips
1983: 73). Speaking of women, the number of rapes increased considerably in the last years just
as like the cases of abused women and domestic violence. As a result to that, the total amount of
divorces is much more numerous lately and all this is due to the fact that Hollywood keeps
reaching for ever-more-obscene levels of killings because it must compete with television (Torr
1974: 54).
The fact that in the 73% of the violent cases, the person remains unpunished increases the
possibility that the viewers (especially those who grew up on TV) adopt aggressive behavior
when a problem comes up, when something doesnt suit them or when they cannot obtain what
they want. (Gheorghe 2005: 295). By time they understand, during watching TV that the
characters on the screen obtain certain efficiency in solving the problems, through violence.
Thus, the viewers learn that they can use violence without being punished for it. TV and movies
do not present the long term effects of violence, do not emphasize the pain and sufferings caused
by such a behavior, hence the viewers consciousness is used to treating aggressiveness in a
superficial way. So, the TV spectators usually adopt aggressive behavior because they cannot
realize its real damages. It results that violence on the screen has an impersonal character. The
victims or the bad deserve their punishment and so, their sufferings and pain tells us nothing. In
other words, people are justified to behave violently with the others as long as the personal
horizon of conscious is blurred by the guilt that is attributed to them. Pestered with this kind of
violence which depersonalizes, modern people dont perceive so much the pain of the others. Not
only that the televised violence did not form a conscience regarding the suffering produced by
aggressiveness, but it also locked in that fundamental intuition that every man can physically feel
pain and that the pain caused to the others should stop or at least diminish aggressiveness and
violence.
These children, teenagers or adults from nowadays that kill, hit, or hurt with cold blood
are in a way spiritual disabled as I mentioned above because they do not have the capacity to
anticipate the sufferings of the others. This treatment of the violences victims in an impersonal

28
context as if these people would deserve their punishment, abates the pitying capacity and so
love for the other people lower. As a result, people became more insensitive which demonstrates
that television is in fact a school of individualism, of selfishness of aggressiveness in which the
others are not regarded as potential friends but as possible enemies.
So, the effects of televised violence are:
- it makes people overestimating the presence of violence in real world; it enhances
feelings like fear, insecurity in front of the dangers seen like impending;
- permanently living the feeling of a potential aggression not only that people become
more stressed, but also they prepare themselves to violently respond to a possible
attack in legitimate or self defense. In this way, the violent behavior is insinuated in
the peoples imagination who justify themselves to use it for avoiding the risk;
- people perceive violence as a legitimate, implicitly component of social institutions.
This world that we live in is a violent one. So violence becomes a necessity.
- people become more insensible to violence, to pain and to suffering. The
aggressiveness becomes more and more a desirable way for solving problems, for
constraint of interests, for obtaining pleasure of wished conveniences.
Again, I dedicated a lot of this argument to television and movies, from the same reasons
I mentioned in the other subchapter. But now it is time to analyze the influence and how other
means of communication and media treat aggressiveness and in what way they influence
behavior and attitude. So, I will stop a moment upon video games which we all know and
observed that they contain far more violence and aggressiveness than movies, cartoons or other
type of media. I chose to speak about video games as they encourage aggressive behavior leading
to physical violence and I strongly suggest that parents should be very careful in choosing the
type of games they let their children to play because they might have unpleasant surprises about
their childrens attitudes later on. Children spend a lot of time playing and the most dangerous
thing is that in this case they become actively involved in the actions, identifying with the
characters they represent. (Anderson 2003: 34 - 35). Therefore, video games are more dangerous
than television as they offer children the possibility of living in a virtual world and acting as
judges, police officers, or other roles, but leading themselves after their own rules and they like
it. They enjoy harming other characters. They are not connected with the reality only with virtual
facts, so the impersonal character of such a world is even more emphasized here. And when they

29
go out in the real world and will encounter difficult situations or conflicts, they will apply the
same laws and principles according to which they guide themselves in the games, not realizing
the effects of their actions. Therefore gestures like hitting, shoving, pitching, pulling at clothes or
hair, kicking, threatening or throwing objects at other people are direct effects of constant
exposure to violence. (Ferguson 2010: 47).
Concerning the internet, there is no sparse research literature, no studies and no statistics
to show that violence promoted by this media and how it influences the social perception. But I
dare saying that as the most web materials containing violence are video games, film clips and
music videos, it is obvious that the arguments used by now are sufficient for proving that there is
a correlation between violence on the internet and an aggressive attitude. It is true that not in the
same manner as TV and movies, because in this case, the person is free to chose if he / she will
watch this kind of material or not, but it influences a lot the people who tend to watch or play
violent clips or films or music. Music also contributes a lot in forming an aggressive attitude and
thinking even though it doesnt lead to concrete violent actions. Still we can see that especially
rap and rock music is full of antisocial overtones and aggressiveness that instigate to violent
language, gestures and thinking. Lets take a look at some examples of lyrics from well knows
songs and see in what way they show or treat this subject. So in Mansons Lunchbox, we can
identify the next lyrics who fu**s with me is gonna get my metal. Pow. Pow. Pow through
he is encouraging gun use. The Beautiful People contains antisocial message of hating all people
there is no time to discriminate, / Hate every motherfu**er thats in your way, Slayer in his
Die by the Sword, we can identify physical violence mingled with sadism Die by my hand in
pools of blood / Clutch yourself as you fall. And finally, Impaled with his Choke On It suggests
that death is beautiful without any pain (impersonal feature of violence) Death will come easy
just close your eyes / Dream of the friends youll see.
All in all we can sum up a few features of aggressiveness and types of violence that
media encourages and which people adopt:
- emotional aggressiveness deals with feelings such as hate, anger and the intent to
harm others;
- aggressive thinking is about beliefs and attitudes that promote aggressiveness and
violence;

30
 - violent language using improper words and tonality in order to threaten, insult or
mock the others;
- physical violence may have different degrees of severity, from pushing to killing;
- impersonal violence and aggressiveness harming others without being aware of the
caused pain and sufferings.

2.3. GROUP STEREOTYPING

Generalizing is a natural human behavior and is an attempt to simplify and categorize

experience. We naturally compare what we do know to what we do not know or think we
know. There is a distinction between stereotypes and generalizations. For example,
generalizations bring together o series of observations and experiences relating to an area or a
group in a simplified way. Its a generalization, therefore, to say that most men like professional
sports, but this does not imply that all men do. Stereotypes on the other hand, describe certain
characteristics invariable to an entire group and they can be positive or negative, even though
negative stereotypes have the tendency to spread more and more.
Speaking of positive stereotypes we can mention the gender ones. It is well known that in
the past the patriarchal family model was highly popularized. The men were the heads of the
family, the financial providers, thus having the possibility of working in good job positions, they
have the right of education, they were independent whereas women were portrayed as being
dependent on the man, without having the possibility to work and have a career, and they were
often portrayed in commercials and advertising and even in movies as staying home, doing
housekeeping, taking care of the babies and cooking. But nowadays we can see that family is
based on collaboration, women and men have equal rights and women are independent and have
the possibility of having a career and a good job position. And we can see that this is a good
stereotype, because it led to womens determination to do something good for themselves and to
evolve. But still, there are some images which still keep the old thinking. For example, in
commercials, women specially are portrayed as being obsessed by cleaning or by a spots which
appear on clothes, thus promoting cleaning products. Other images of women in commercials
portray sensual, attractive young ladies promoting cosmetics or products for men, or healthy
products, suggesting that the thinner you get, the healthier you are. On the other side, men are

31
portrayed and presented as athletic, having perfect bodies, seductive, usually having a good car
and a last generation phone. Also the solidarity between men is emphasized for promoting beer
or pubs. In terms of primetime television, an issue that has been on the news recently is how
many women are seen on television represented by unrealistically thin images of preeminent
actresses in Hollywood. Shows such Ally McBeal and Friends have generated a great amount of
controversy over how these images affect a number of women viewers into aspirators of
attaining these virtually unattainable bodies. While television images provide only one aspect of
this culture that lead women to desire these traits, it deserves the most attention because of how
pervasive television has become in American society. The negative aspect of these media trends
is seen in the fact that many women suffer of bulimia in hope of reaching a slim figure. Also men
become more and more concerned about their physical aspect, but this is a good thing because it
motivates them to practice sports and to be active.
Thus media provides an important source of information through which people gain
knowledge. Mass media radio, television, film, print press, advertisement, commercials
magazine and internet is powerful. The messages transmitted by media dominate our
thinking, especially when the viewers have little or no opportunity of firsthand observation5.
The film industry is the most influential entity on the planet and is an almost universally
accepted American icon. Besides acknowledging the fact that television media often offers
negative stereotypical portrayals of individuals belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups,
social psychology goes further by examining the direct implications of these mostly negative
images. One of these implications is the notion of stereotype threat, the risk of confirming a
negative stereotype about ones group as characteristic. As an individual is constantly exposed to
negative images of his / her ethnic group, this person begins to internalize the same social and
personal characteristics of these images. Most people tell themselves not to believe stereotypes.
But they do, because they always see it, its in the back of their minds. All TV programs transmit
them, even the entertainment industry does, because stereotypes provoke amusement, and finally
people, subconsciously believe that comic characterizations. But the consequences are negative,
leading viewers to take those stereotypes as something truthful.
Print media also has its contribution in making these ideas grow into our minds and
hearts. Take for example the photo of a suffering woman or man in an article about terrorism and

5
See http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm

32
Islamic people. The pain of the man or woman exposed on the pages besides the article makes
the reader to emotionally get involved in the story due to his empathy. He feels pain, or sorrow
for the victims and he identifies with their situation, thus being himself / herself a victim of those
violent acts creating feelings of anger, disgust and hate towards the authors of the violent act.
Also words like bad dream, tragedy, horror, terrorists the well known terror set designers,
bloody bodies, hell, unacceptable acts, barbarian acts only root hate into peoples minds and
hearts. Titles like Terror is back, makes connections with previous events, even if the authors, as
I said before are unknown. And this causes them to be very harsh in taking decisions about
punishment, but more often, they make stereotypes identifying terrorists with all Islamic people.
Or, there are terrorists, and nobody denies this. But claiming that most of Islamic people are
violent, cruel and indoctrinated is a negative thing and an untrue one. And this is only one
example about how print press uses the image to influence and persuade. For example, when an
explosion or major damages happen due to accident, the press fastens to blame the terrorists,
even if the real authors werent the terrorists, but lets face it, terror sells and this is the purpose:
for the people to buy the magazines and newspapers. (Garcin-Marrou 2005: 17).
And for emphasizing this, I would like to offer a personal experience as an eloquent
example of how these stereotypes affect our thinking. This summer, I was in Valencia, Spain and
while waiting for the subway to come, I saw three Islamic people coming at the station, having
suitcases in their hands. The first thought which came into my mind was: What if they will
leave the suitcases in the station and they go or run away? What if no one sees when they will do
that? What if they are terrorists? and a slight feeling of fear was rapidly spreading in my heart.
Then, I said to myself: it is obvious that I, myself am a victim of these stereotyping so much
promoted by mass media, which emphasizes that Islamic people are terrorists. I stood beside and
I watched what happens and what these people do, as well as their behavior. Each time they went
near some groups for asking information they were watched and observed with suspicion and
people were reticent in offering information. And it is obvious why. The messages promoted by
mass media concerning this specific group of people are explicit and they met into the peoples
minds that these people are dangerous. But from a further conversation I found out that they
were nice married people, having children and living in Spain for more than 6 years. And they
thanked me that I was so willing to communicate with them, telling me that they can see the
reticence in the other people and that they feel really discriminated. We can only imagine how

33
their children will grow up in an environment where they are regarded as suspect people and
what effects this marginalization will have upon their minds and thinking. Later on, this year I
met more Islamic people from Pakistan, Iran, Morocco, and I found out that they are very nice
people, but they suffer a lot because of these stereotypes and they are disadvantaged even in the
medical system. I will offer one more example before I move on speaking of other stereotypes
like these. One evening, while being in Italy, one of my dearest Iranian friends, accidently
seriously burnt himself with boiling water. After calling the ambulance we went to the hospital
by feet to be there for him in such critical moments. We spoke in English and the nurses and
doctor treated us very well until they found out my friends nationality. After knowing that he is
an Iranian they started to speak cruelly and the doctor got angry because we called the
ambulance for just some superficial injuries. And the staff followed his example in treating him
like this. Moreover, they made him waiting more than an hour before giving him painkillers and
offer him medical treatment and after this time they sent him home by feet. And we walked
about 40 minutes till we got home, because we didnt have a car. And my friend had such a great
pain. I was very surprised and angry to see that people are treated according to their nationality.
And while I went to speak with the doctor, before getting into his office I overheard him
screaming and complaining that he doesnt want to treat terrorists. I wasnt angry anymore. I was
sad both for my friend and for the doctor. For my friend because he kept repeating that this isnt
the first time such a thing happens to him and that he gets used to such a treatment; and for the
doctor because he couldnt see that he is a victim of mass media which created such a strong
impact over him as to neglect his patients and to be insensitive to their pains and sufferings. And
in this context I wonder how much the peoples perceptions and attitudes will be infested by
these messages of the negative stereotypes determining them to hate and to disregard each other.
Because as we can see, a persons intellectual level doesnt have anything to do with the attitudes
which are strongly influenced by negative stereotypes. But we shouldnt be surprised when talk
shows, movies, magazines and news promote such ideas and we can see images like the
following every step:

34
 And as I said before, these are not the only examples which illustrate the way mass media
influence our attitudes, way of thinking and behavior. Lets take a look at rap videos, for
example and we will see that they speak about a Black culture, where drug and gun use are
spread all over, where women are seen as objects, where an improper language and aggressive
behavior are frequently popularized. The most tragic think is that a lot of young boys take this
facts and characteristics as being true and they internalize this bad boy image, which lead in
the American society to an increasing of drug use and dealing among black youngsters, to the so

35
called gang formation and the wars between gangs, which in its turn increased gun use and the
number of killings in this kinds of neighborhood. And also black people are often portrayed as
being inferior:

Together with black people, the native American Indians are also bad labeled, being
called redskins, or savages. Thus, stereotyping causes real harm to people. It harms the
physical and mental well-being of the minorities being labeled. It should be obvious that wrongly
labeling people is harmful. Anyone whos ever been called a daunce, or weakling, or slut
can attest to that. The hurt feelings last long after the source is gone. People often remember the
pain of name-calling all their lives. Not only stereotypes harm the victims, it arguably harms the
victimizers. Suppose youre a redneck, or hillibilly, or white trash who believes youre
better than a minority. Instead of finding common cause with people who might agree with you,
you end up fighting them. Its the epitome of a divide and conquer strategy. Stereotypes also
harm society as a whole. They reinforce our dominant cultural attitudes about race, gender, class,
religion and other defining traits. They allow the people in power to remain in power. If Indians,
black people and other groups are deemed inferior or worthless, we can take their possessions
and rights and not feel bad about it. 6(http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm).

6
See http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm

36
 3.4. MATERIALISM AND CONSUMERISM

Among the other things which I have mentioned before, materialism and consumerism
are also things or ideas promoted by media, which seems to suggest that without the material
things we cannot be happy or fulfilled. But before proceeding with further examination of these
things, I would like to offer the definition of these two concepts as they are illustrated in the
Oxford Dictionary. Thus, concerning materialism, it has three main dimensions: the first one
explains that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling,
mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena; the second
approach of the term is the theory or attitude according to which physical well-being and worldly
possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life. And the last sense of the term
speaks about a great excessive regard for worldly concerns. Regarding consumerism, this is
described as being the concept that an ever-expanding consumption of goods is advantageous to
the economy, as the fact or practice of an increasing consumption of goods, but also as a modern
movement for the protection of the consumer against useless, inferior, or dangerous products,
misleading advertisements, unfair pricing etc.
Taking into consideration the definitions and if we take a good look around us we can
easily see that the modern mans main interest is exactly achieving the things described above.
The problem is tragic and I dare saying that it is sad indeed because people nowadays look at
each other as competitors in a game mass media launch and in which we are actually victims of
the system and techniques of persuasion and manipulation. People dont see each other as friends
and if not friends at least as acquaintances, but as I said before as competitors. In this context,
feelings like envy, anger, desire of having more, are easily born in our minds and hearts. And as I
proceeded with this study, questions like: Do we really want to be like this or we are just a kind
of result of materialism and consumerism?; Why are we never satisfied and always want more
and more?; Are we even aware of the thing that we are transformed day by day and become like
puppets having the role of wanting things we can never have?; Are we aware of the things that
we really need are not the material things but a free life where we can make our own choices?
raised into my mind and I realized that mass media have an important role in putting these ideas
into our hearts and we let ourselves sunken in a kind of reverie from which we cannot easily
wake up. I will try to prove that in this kind of society, real values are substituted by superficial

37
and unrealistic ideas and concepts because in our society money is the basic and the most
important criteria for a happy and easy life. And in most of the cases, money cannot buy peace,
serenity, fulfillment and happiness, even though many people say that money doesnt buy
happiness but contributes to its achievement. I do not say that we should live in precarious
conditions and stop buying things. I only say that there are things we dont need but we buy them
because we think they make us happy or because they are strongly recommended by
commercials and advertisements.
But first, I would like to analyze the message transmitted by television in this case. And
we can easily observe that is does not constitute an exception, as shows and movies strongly
suggest that wealthy is the equivalent of happiness. In any kind of movie the actors have good
places to live, modern houses or flats, good cars, expensive cell phones, good clothes, good jobs,
great careers. And when we watch TV, we identify each other with the characters we see, living
and experiencing new feelings and social positions, we live besides the actors, we are richer,
more powerful, we revenge ourselves, we love, we hate, we live in our own world and we dare to
experience our deepest thoughts which sometimes we dont have the courage to say out loud
because they are not moral ones. (Gheorghe: 2008 v.3) But movies and shows make this thing
become possible. So what happens if we always see on the screen that rich characters are also
influential? We will want to buy those things they have, because in this way we consider that we
will gain happiness and a good life. But let us be realistic: how many of us can afford the luxury,
cars, houses, clothes and other things which actors, models or other stars have? How many of us
can really afford to live the kind of life they live? And we try and we work so hard in order to
achieve these things, and when we do and we watch again and we see something new which
makes us we the impulse of buying more, hoping that we can have the easy life the actors on the
screen have. But as Gheorghe says:

Women can never have a silhouette and such a provocative physical appearance, a life without
worries, or the stars comfort, pleasures, and wealthy, even if they sometimes resort to drastically
diets, to plastic surgeries or gymnastics. Men cannot have the muscles, charm, power, authority
and efficiency of those they see on the screen. We cannot always remain young, and untouched
by problems, worries, diseases - when we have to live our lives, to work, to make a family.
Whatever we do we cannot compete with the heroes from TV But in reality, they are not so
beautiful, or rich and almost never as happy and winning as we see them. Their role is to suggest

38
 perfection, to contribute to the creation of the image, to the excitement of the spectators
imagination and at the desire of being like them. (Gheorghe: 2008, 76)

And we can firmly say that movies and shows will never lack such models that instigate
our desire of identifying ourselves with and to try to convince us that material things bring
happiness. Having the strongest power to persuade and convince from the history of humanity,
television is used especially for creating certain attitudes (social, political, consumerist).
Actually, the whole advertising industry has set as a goal in the creation of certain needs, in
influencing people to buy certain services and products which promise acquiring comfort,
happiness, pleasure. (Gheorghe 2008 V. II: 61).
So the major role of advertisements and commercials is to convince us to buy the product
they promote. Hundreds of millions of dollars which are invested annually prove the efficacy of
the persuasion methods they use. People who pay so much money in advertising, are neither
paranoiac nor crazy to spend such amount of money just to see their product exposed if they
wouldnt have any realistic profits after these campaigns. So commercials are made to
determine customers to buy, to buy and to buy more. (Streitmatter 2006: 160). We sometimes
buy things we dont really need, only because we saw them on TV and the desire to have them
was inoculated in our minds by the comercials powerful message because advertisements have
turned luxuries into needs and created needs where there never was one before (Shah: 2008). In
order to make you understand I will tell you about a personal experience related to this matter. A
few weeks ago, I watched a small pamphlet given to me in a shop. It was an advertisement to a
mobile phone company, Samsung and the new product they promote (Galaxy 4S). It was such a
good presentation which emphasized the need to have it, the benefits you get by using it, the fact
that it easies your life and the most interesting thing was that the message was organized in order
to send a clear message to all types of people: youngsters, old people, business men, sportsmen
etc. but hiding the price. For a moment I agreed with it and said it is really necessary and I even
thought of buying one. Then I said I do very well with my mobile phone as well because it is not
so old. Many of the applications from my phone were identical to the model Ive seen; its just
that the exposed model had new attractive applications. But you see, for a moment I even
thought of buying it, that convincing was the advertisement. And I gave you this example
because I am sure that these things didnt happen only to me and that this is a reality we live

39
every day. We sell our old things in order to buy new ones, even if we dont really need them
that much and even if we can handle it very well with the things we have. It is all a business.
And as an eloquent example, I will offer other examples from my personal experience, in order
to make you see the real face of the way advertisements influence us and the decision we make
when we buy certain things.
Before Ive started this study I worked as promoter and as a supervisor for seven
advertisement companies. Ive promoted some the most well-known products in the world:
Pepsi, Colgate, Nestle, Nike etc. But I will not speak about my experience as supervisor, but
about that of the simple promoter and I would like to say that in the beginning I worked in big
supermarkets standing besides the stands with our products and directly interacted with people
And I saw thousands of people who came determined not to buy the things we promoted, but
after hearing our presentation, they were determined to get our products being convinced that
they need it. And let me tell you one thing: many times there wasnt even a big difference
between certain products Ive promoted and the ones people wanted to buy in the first place.
Moreover, sometimes the things we said werent even true, but the main goal is to increase
selling and that was what mattered. And we were paid so much to do this because as I said
before, everything is just a big, big business. The sad thing is that we dont see this and we
continue to let ourselves influenced by commercials and advertisements and we buy and we buy
and we think that we do the right choice, just because a commercial tells us its true. So, the so-
called culture of consumption develops more and more and we contribute so much at its
extension.
But there are also other means of convincing people to buy and acquire certain things.
Everywhere we go we see big panels of advertisements, newspapers and magazines influence us
and also the electronic media has catapulting advertising and consumption to new levels and the
explosion of the internet brings a threat of further advertisement over exposure. (Shah 2008).
Shows like What No to Wear convinces people that they have to change their own individual
style and fashion experts change people into what seems to be another version of
themselves.(Todd 2011: 48). So people have the opportunity to become someone else, someone
they want to and they have the possibility and means to do it. Fashion experts change people by
dressing them up with clothes from certain brands, which they say, give you more independence
and makes you feel important. You need to do that for you mental well being and for positivism.

40
 Perhaps one of the most liberating forms of consumerism is the concept of making a new self.
The process of consumerism makes it possible for a person to move from one area of society to
another independent of circumstances of birth, gender, or race. Advertising offers the image of
the transformed self; and consumption offers the means of effecting that transformation. One of
the best examples of this relationship can be found in womens magazines. In a way, these
magazines constitute a sort of meta-advertisement, an advertisement for advertising. Consider this
1985 subscription-soliciting letter for the womens magazine Glamour: If youll give me just a
minute of your time now, I honestly believe that I can help you change almost anything about
yourself that you want to Begin the great and continuing makeover of you. Not only does
Glamour promise to give you hours of idle entertainment; they provide the opportunity to create a
new self. The promised opportunities for transformation are made more plausible, more desirable
and more necessary by articles that present various techniques of transformation. (Todd 2011: 49)

And this transformation may be so easily obtained simply by buying certain products that these
magazines, shows and televised programs offer. But these post modern people who are
encouraged to buy and acquire so many things and products, can never be happy or satisfied,
because through the products they buy, they cant achieve happiness and fulfillment, because
those products are simply shallow images of a happiness they cannot obtain, they are vain
promises which cant offer happiness. Hence people become unhappy and they hope to find
happiness, they try to catch the illusions by buying more and more products. So you see, beyond
the possibility to choose a certain brand, people actually buy ideas and feelings. For example,
there are people who sustain that they cannot be influenced to choose a certain brand. But the
idea is to buy. So, for example for a woman, all the commercials for face creams suggest that in
order to become beautiful, women should buy or use as much crme as possible and this thing
encourages consumerism. And this type of advertisement promises happiness and beauty so
women actually buy the idea of becoming like the one they see in commercials, a perfect face
with a perfect body. And you cannot have that if you dont buy the product. Havent you noticed
that in commercials and television old people are almost inexistent? They are neither funny nor
attractive, so their image cannot sell. Or if they exist, they are so wealthy and in such a good
shape that they look almost like the young ones. So besides beauty, people are encouraged to buy
product in order to keep their youth and attractiveness. Thus people buy and buy and cant stop

41
buying, hoping that in this way they can keep themselves young, sexy, sensual and wealthy
because what they see convinces them that this is true.
Still the most shocking thing for me related to this topic wasnt the fact that I discovered a lot
of things about how mass media influences and convinces us to become consumerists but to find
out the ideals of the young generation. When I interrogated about one hundred students with age
between 10 and 16 years old and asked them what they would like to become, what career would
they like to embrace when they grow up 37% of the boys declared that they would like to
develop their own business, because in this way they dont have to work and they will always
have money. But even more striking were the girls ideas about their future. Most of them said
that they would like to be actresses, models, singers, to work in television and be prepared: to
marry with old people who are sick and rich, because if the man is rich, they will live a happy
life and if he is old and sick he will die and they will inherit his fortune. This is the so-called
3B ideal as the girls name it.7 But in the end theres no wonder they think and wish this kind of
life if this is what they constantly see on TV: Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris with a difference
of 60 years, Anthony Queen and Kathy Benvin 47 years, Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stones star
was 61 when he met 20 years old Ekaternina Ivanova, Dennis Hopper and Katherine LaNasa
31 years gap, the famous Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones with an age difference of 25
years, Harrison Ford and Calistra Flockhart, Paul McCartney and Nacy Shevell, Madonna and
Brahim Zaibat and the examples might go on and on.
So if teenagers see these examples in mass media
every day and they see that this kind of life is easy and
happy, of course that this is what they would like to do
I the future. Because mass media creates models to
follow for the young generation, and youngsters easily
embrace the ideas and lifestyle promoted by mass
media. The lack of alternatives push teenagers and not
only to tale their models from those they see on the
screens, in magazines and in this way as I said before,
there is no wonder of the way students think and wish for their lives.

7
The three Bs come from the Romanian words bogat, batran and bolnav, meaning rich, old and sick.

42
 3. HOW CAN WE LIVE WITH MEDIA?

3.1. THE CHILDREN

Television and computers facilitate learning, develop mental abilities, and offer
information. They help the new generation in becoming more gifted and this new generation is
capable to confront the world and life with all its problems because they are prepared for it. They
are informed about everything around them so they can get prepared later on for real life.
Because of these beliefs, million dollars have been spent on televised educational programs. So
the screen and the computer monitors became unfailing in schools. Also at home, parents got
used to sit their children in front of TV from the earliest ages and to consider it (the television) a
great baby sitter. But even if television offers many benefits, it also makes plenty of harm and
that is why it is not recommended for children till the age of 5 or 6 to watch TV (Mander 1995:
53).
The television does not consider a proper environment for a good breeding for a child
because it doesnt offer a palpable reality which is so important for the development of the
neuronal networks. What the child does every day, the way he thinks, the way in which he
communicates, what he learns, the stimuli which attract his attention all these have the power to
modify the structure of his brain. Not only that they change the way the brain functions
(functional changes), but also causes structural differences in the systems of the neuronal tracts.
A separation from the corresponding stimuli will have dramatic consequences upon the mind.
The brain needs feeding in order to properly develop. But the brains food consists of the
environment stimuli, the mental and existential challenges that human beings meet from the first
years of life. If these experiences are poor, than the brain will be underdeveloped (Healy 1990:
51). For a better understanding of the way in which television causes the brains
underdevelopment it is necessary to expose the fundamental criteria that must be accomplished
by the environment in order to provide a good development.
So, the most propitious period for the growth of the cortical areas responsible of seeing,
hearing and speaking is till the age of 5 6 years old (Gheorghe 2005: 68). Parents who know
that a rich environment facilitates a normal and a better development exaggerate in decorating

43
their childrens rooms by put many objects inside; they paint the walls in strong colors, they also
play a lot of music to them and allow children to watch a lot at TV. But when the scientists speak
of a rich environment they refer to one which may provide a complex experience of reality, of
that world around them which may incite the imagination and the interest. When the stimuli
become too aggressive, they may inhibit the activity which they should help. So, the experience
lived by the child should be a reflexive one, meaning that the environment should not be
agitated, but contrary, a calm one. Because not the external experience matters but the intensity
of the inner reflexive process, the monologues about the amazing world etc (Asociatia pentru
Apararea Familiei si Copilului 2008: 26). Another specific feature of a proper environment is
language and the dialogue with the parents. The parents are the best guides for children because
they teach them how to understand the world. The dialogue, the words slowly spoken with
patience and love by the parent occupies one of the most important condition for a good
development of the language and neuronal networks. Another important condition for a good
functioning of the brain is the active implication of the child in the daily experience. The child
must be able to control the reality for implying the exploring process. He must touch the objects
he sees, he must be able to move them, to play with them in a word, to actively use them.
Smelling flowers, playing in the sand, running after a butterfly, playing with other children are
simple illustrative examples of an active implication. But when the stimuli around him are too
strong (noises, sudden or powerful moves) the child may scare or inhibit. The environment
should only arouse the curiosity because a normal brain stimulates itself by the things that are
interesting and challenging.
Television thus cannot be considered a proper environment which helps the neuronal
structure to develop. In front of the TV the child doesnt have the ordinary experience of reality.
He cant touch, smell, or speak. He just watches others doing it. So they get used to this kind of
experience and they dont want to understand what happens around them. They are content only
with sensations (Large 1992: 33). Not only that the TV doesnt offer an interactive experience,
bur also it passives the human mind. After long exposures to TV, children tend to remain in the
same mood and the desire of implication in the realitys experiences lowers. As a result to that,
the capacity of imagining games and the mental dynamism lowers too. Concerning all those
things, specialists advice us that children should not be allowed to watch TV till the age of 5 6

44
years old, because this is the period when the neuronal networks are built up with the help of real
experiences and interactive implication in reality. (Mander 1992: 53).
Another series of bad consequences which may be identified at children between 6 12
years have an impact upon language, memory, attention and learning. Concerning language, the
American teachers identify some series of disabilities at the generations that grow up on TV:
- weakening of the listening skills, the incapacity of maintaining the attention, of
understanding and remembering an oral presentation;
- weaken ability in exposing a coherent speech;
- tendency of using abusive nonverbal language besides words;
- weakening of vocabulary under the forth grades level;
- appearance of the verbal tics, of some words that say nothing used instead of the
correct ones (for example: you know, oh, well);
- insecurity in understanding some texts with high level of meaning;
- difficulty of understanding long phrases, the interspersed sentences or the complex
grammatical structures;
- difficulty of passing from colloquial language to the written one (Healy 1990: 99).
Compared to the children of some generations ago, the ones nowadays cannot stay quiet
and listen short stories or discussions. But they have a more enriched vocabulary, containing
more sophisticated words, which they memorize from television, commercials, advertisements,
cartoons. They seem to be smarter than the ones from the past generations. But the understanding
and speaking disabilities become more obvious as they grow up and problems advance more and
more.
LD (Learning disabilities) is a term that appeared at the beginning of the 70s and is an
affection that most of the American children suffer. This deficit is characteristic to the children
who cant listen or follow a simple presentation, who have problems with their memory, who
cannot read everything of what they consider as boring, who are incapable to resolve an
elementary problem. (Healy 1990: 42). Many of the people who are diagnosed with LD have not
ever made psycho pedagogical test for being registered in the official statistics, but their number
quickly spreads. Between 1976 and 1985 it was registered an increasing of the number of LD
children from 796.569 to 1.848.447 (Healy 1990: 139). The problem is that in most of the cases,
children diagnosed with LD do not manifest symptoms in everyday life. The deficiencies will be

45
evident when they are asked to learn something in an organized way and to sustain the learnt
materials by applying logic and analysis. (Gheorghe 2005: 39). In making the connection
between the LD syndrome and television, the children get the information by concentrating their
attention upon visual representations (pictures, images) or upon the nonverbal sounds (music,
special effects, cracks or fusses) and not through following a dialogue. In order to understand a
complex subject, children should pass over the special effects which get their attention. They
have to concentrate upon some aspects which are not such spectacular, such as the ordinary
speaking of a man. And this thing is difficult for the ones that grew up on TV.
Another problem that cusses LD is the bad functioning of the memory. A serious problem
identified at the children who spent daily several hours in front of the screen is that they cannot
remember the meaning of the words they have just read and heard. Before the teacher or
someone else reaches the end of the phrase they already forgot the first indications. This process
is due to the incapacity of a quick understanding of the written texts or of the listened message,
but also to a weak activation of the memorizing techniques. Good memorizing requires
intellectual exercise and perseverance (Healy 1990: 231). Also, reading is bad influenced by the
television, because children do not have patience to stay and read a book. They prefer spending
hours in front of the TV, because it is much easier. Watching TV does not suppose intellectual
exercise, because you get everything readymade, but reading does. Reading also develops the
information, because while you read, you create in your mind images reflecting the information
given by the text. But the problem is that reading is considered nowadays too boring and
cartoons and movies win against books.
In America, the most of the ones diagnosed as LDs also suffer of ADHD (Attention
Deficit with or without Hyperactivity Disorder). In some cases, more than half of the children are
hyperactive (Healy 1990: 140). The hyperactivity supposes a continuously agitation of one
person, a gentle mood of anxiety of nervousness which often may be characterized by the
continuously moving of the legs or hands. Even if there is not a clear definition of ADHD, the
majority of the doctors and teachers have identified some features of it:
- incapacity of finishing the started activity;
- incapacity of listening;
- difficulty in staying concentrated or connected to a certain activity;
- acting before thinking;

46
 - quick replacing of an activity with another;
- difficulty in organizing and planning the actions;
- difficulty of waiting his / her turn (Healy 1990: 154).
Thus, because of all these bad consequences caused directly or indirectly by television,
the researchers in the field advice that children should not be allowed to watch TV at least till the
age of 5 6 years old. After this period an hour only is recommended, because children should
know reality as it is, they should be encouraged to discover it themselves, to do practical things
that help developing their memory and imagination, rather than a passive mood in front of the
TV. In order to do that, parents should make up a set of rules for their children, because
discipline, as a well-established set of rules free the children of the terror that insecurity which so
much information gives them. If you want an unstable child, just give him / her whatever they
ask, whenever they cry. But if you want a well educated and formed child learn how to say no
to certain things that harm them and try to be consequent, even if the child doesnt always
understand your decisions. (Garfield 2008: 24). Of course that the duty of any parent is to
explain their children why they act in certain ways and why they make the decisions they make,
because it is important that children should at least be informed even if they dont understand
everything, because when theyll have the capacity to understand, they will remember the words
of their parents and the advice their parents offered.

3.2. THE TEENAGERS

Adolescence is a period when the personality and the temperament of a person are built
up. In this period the environmental influence is very important for the development of the self,
of who you are, or who you end up being. It is the most critical period in ones life, because the
confusion settles in the mind, the tendency of copying the strongly manifests even if the desire of
being original stays there in the bottom of the heart. So, the teenager takes a little from there, a
little from here and in this way, he / she creates a self, his own personality.
Thus, it is very important in this period for teenagers to have a good guide, a good model,
an excellent example, who must be able to initiate the young seeker into the secrets of life.
Friendship relationships built on now are very important because they can influence one in a
positive way or can destroy ones life. In this period many of the teenagers socialize with the

47
wrong people who drag them into all sort of bad things: drugs, alcohol, violence etc. So, the
environment in which the teenagers spend their everyday lives has a defining role for who the
teenager will become. From this perspective, television does not constitute a proper environment
which may provide the teens positive initializing, even if TV is regarded by young people as a
best friend. It is always there when you need it; it never gets upset on you; it always tells you
what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. And this is the big problem: it tells you what
you want to hear, not what you need to hear. The environment offered by television is a very
interesting and exciting one, especially for the teenagers curious minds, but it is not always the
best to chose, because sexuality and violence are specific features of the televised world. And if
every day one sees the same kind of reactions, the same bad behavior, in the end he will end up
thinking that that is the right way to act or to speak. That is why parents should play an important
role in the life of their children especially in this period. They are the ones who may guide their
children on the right path. They should communicate with them, even if it is very hard, and not
just abandon them in front of the TV.
In fact, specialists say that TV should be placed in a central part of the house because in
this way, they can monitor their children and can prevent some unpleasant situations, like
watching erotic and violent programs which may leave a mark on the teenagers way of thinking
(Gheorghe 2005, Asociatia pentru Protectia Copilului si Familiei 2008, Healy 1990). But some
of the parents think its good for the children to have a TV in their rooms, because television has
also its good parts. They consider their children mature enough for choosing the right programs
to watch at. But they are not. Of course television has its positive sides, but in this period it may
constitute a bad tool also. Instead of doing that, of allowing their children to discover reality
through TV, the reality as it is on the screen, a fake one, the parents should involve more in their
childrens lives and to determine him / her to see reality as it is. Communication between parts
plays a very important role now. Teenagers should be taught all the things they need to know.
Also, they should be encourages to participate to social activities, to meet new people, to
communicate. Because those teenagers who actually get involved in reality, are more prepared to
face the world with all its problems, than the ones who isolate themselves in front of the TV and
generally speaking all sorts of mass media, feeding with something that others want you to
believe, not the truth.

48
 Considering all these things, specialists recommend that teenagers should be allowed to
watch TV only an hour a day, at most two hours (Mander 1978: 61)., because otherwise the
teenagers may adopt the improper behavior characterized by the features:
- difficulties in following some instructions;
- difficulties in maintaining the attention concentrated on a certain issue;
- sudden passing from an activity to another without finishing either of them;
- not listening what he is told;
- the tendency of having a bad company;
- using a violent and obscene language;
- difficulties in reminding or understanding oral presentations;
- limited vocabulary under the age level;
- the using of verbal tics and gestures instead of words;
- running away of the individual effort;
- running away of responsibilities;
- quick renunciation in front of obstacles (Asociatia pentru Apararea Familiei si
Copilului 2008: 110 - 111).
On the other hand, if someone believes that these measures are outdated, parents could at
least try to convince or suggest their children to watch real educative programs. We already
know the power of influence television has, so we can use this tool for doing something good
with it, so educative programs which deal with subjects teenagers like and are attracted of, can be
very useful for the intellectual growth of youngsters, or can make them be more responsible.
Remember what Madonna succeeded to do with her televised concerts where she promoted a
responsible sex8 and how the population became more aware of the dangers of the unprotected
sexual activity and the measures they took.
Concerning the magazines, parents should let the teenagers to have a choice of their own
in choosing them, but they should try to read them as well, even if at their age they dont seem to
be interested in the subjects they deal with. But in this way, teens will see that their parents have
the same preoccupations as they do, and moreover it gives parents the opportunity to discuss
certain subject with their children and to explain why certain things are not the way the
magazines tell them to be. Parents shouldnt allow print media to be the main source of

8
See subchapter Sexuality

49
information for teens, because we all know by now that mass media use sensational things to talk
about even if these things are half true or even if the facts they expose dont reflect reality. For
the electronic media, this is harder to control or to influence the teenagers, because they use it so
much and because they can delete the historical of the pages they surfed on. But the purpose is
not to create a barrier between children and parents by controlling their actions and their
decisions. But a good education certainly influences the personality and thus, parents should play
an important role in the first years of life and especially in the period of adolescence. Of course
that their curiosity will push them to watch certain programs which arent proper for their age,
but this is normal, because not all teenagers can openly speak about everything with their
parents. But a good education as I said before, will stop teenagers from doing exaggerate things.

3.2. THE ADULTS

The adults are mature enough to choose for themselves the type of programs they want to
watch. They possess an already formed personality and the power to discern between good and
evil, so they cannot be told what to do, or what they should watch at, even if they might be
influenced by the TV message.
But adults, especially parents and grandparents play an essential role for children and
teenagers, together with those whom they take as models. Because they, as models are watched
at every step and the way they speak, act or think will be assimilated by watchers even if at the
beginning this process is unconsciously. When parents offer themselves as models for their
children, they will create the fundamental environment for the formation of their children. So, for
preparing their children to fly in the horizon of maturity, they have to offer them five
important leading activities:

- an emotional, effective communication, which is essential (till the age of one year old);
- the concrete exploration through senses, of things, their active manipulation
(from one to three years);
- the diversifying of games (from three to seven years) because the game is in this period the
childrens labor and activity;
- teaching, the creative implication, giving the initiative, the responsibility (from seven years
old);

50
 - social communication with the ones of the same age. (Asociatia pentru Apararea Familiei
si Copilului 2008: 113).

But the sad thing is that parents choose to put their children in front of the TV and forget
that real life is a better environment for children than the televised one. More than that, they stay
in front of the TV 4 6 hours a day and they use for their own information mass media, offering
their children a bad example. And even if they require their children to stop watching TV, they
do not have strength in their words, because their own example shows the contrary thing to what
they say. So, the adults should be more responsible of their actions, because children not only
take the example of using mass media, but they also copy the kind of programs to watch, the type
of magazines to read, which newspapers to buy, what kind of music to listen. So, it is
recommended that in front of the children and the teenagers, the adults should watch educational
programs which may provide good advices for their children, to read good magazines (by good I
dont mean popular, but good in the sense that they provide decent and true subjects for
discussion). But the ideal situation will be that the adults should change their routine of spending
hours and hours in front of the screen and finding another way of relaxing, a way that implies
their children also. Many of the adults say that by watching TV, they enjoy a moment of peace,
of silence, without being buzzed by their childrens crisis and caprices. And besides, they sustain
that their children are quiet in front of the TV, they are so obedient and they get wiser. But they
are not aware of the danger they expose their children to. But the kind of relaxing that television
offers is in fact an agitated one, a malefactor one. So, the adults should choose other way of
relaxing, like sleeping, walking or other activities such these. And the same, they should spend in
front of the TV the same number of hours they ask their children to watch (from one hour to at
most three hours a day). (Mander 1978: 71).
For their own good, adults should not watch programs, movies, shows or read articles
that contain too much violence, because not only teenagers may assimilate violent behavior, but
the adults too. It is true, not in the same proportion that teenagers do, but some influences might
be traced also in adults behaviors and attitudes. They get worse as the time allotted to watching
TV grows. Also, the bad influences of the erotic message are detailed in the chapter entitled
Sexuality as well as the others caused by violence in the subchapter entitles the same. Adults
may consider themselves strong enough against all these features, but the statistics and all the

51
researches prove the contrary. Adults are influenced as well as two other categories even if this
idea is not slightly accepted. Thus, erotic, violent, stereotypical and consumerist messages that
mass media send are not recommended in this case either.

52
 4. OPINION SURVEY

This part of the paper is very important as it provides pragmatic data about what I have
said in the previous chapters of my thesis. So, for proving that mass media have an important
role in influencing our thoughts, I conceived an opinion survey. This was applied on 98 people
from 13 different countries: Romania, Albania, France, Poland, Pakistan, Italy, Spain, Iran,
Belgium, Morocco, Cameroon, Canada, and Brazil. The age of the individuals who were
interrogated differs from 12 to 77 years old. In the next section of the paper I will offer detailed
information about each question and I will try to analyze the results.

4.1. ANALYZING THE RESULTS

In order to analyze the responses, I will present each question and I will emphasize the
answers using concrete data and percentage in order to make a better illustration of the results.
So the first question was: How many hours a day do you spend watching TV, surfing the internet
and reading magazines or newspapers? For this question people sustained that they spend from
less than one hour to ten hours a day with mass media. The average of hours people spend in
front of the TV, internet and magazines is of 4.12 hours a day. From these people, youngsters
between 12 and 30 years old spend between 5 and 6 hours per day watching TV, surfing on the
internet or reading magazines. People between 30 and 50 years old spend about 3.12 hours and
people between 51 and 77 years old spend 2.40 hours a day with mass media. So we can easily
see that youngsters spend the most time informing themselves from mass media and that is why
they are so easily influenced by it.
For the second question (Do you think that mass media generally speaking influence
attitudes, behaviors and social perception) 95.4% of the individuals responded positively,
meaning that yes, they believe that mass media influence a lot. The rest of 4.6% declared that
they believe that mass media is just a tool and in the end, people believe and behave the way they
want to. For the third question, Do you think mass media influence your attitude and behavior?
71.4% of the answers were negative and only 39.6% of the people declared that they feel
influenced by mass media. This means that people generally believe that mass media influence

53
others, but not them, because they are quite self confident and believe that they are not so easily
fooled.
With the fourth question Do you believe in extramarital and casual sex? from the
opinion survey I wanted to prove that the more people are spending with mass media, the more
they accept a superficial sexual activity and the more they accept the sexual liberties shown in
mass media and they practice them in real life. The results are as I expected, so 36.3% of people
declared that they agree with this kind of behavior and the average of hours these people spend
daily watching TV, surfing on the internet or reading newspapers is 5.7 hours a day in the
context in which the other part accumulated a number of only 2.4 hours a day. So you can see
that the amount of influence is directly proportional with the amount of time we spend in front of
the TV or reading unclear information provided by media.
Questions number 6, 7, 11, and 12 are closely connected to each other and they regard the
stereotypes that mass media promote. Thus for question number 11 in which people were asked
to say if they think mass media are responsible for creating certain stereotypes, 76.2% of them
said that mass media is responsible for creating certain stereotypes (especially towards
immigrants, old people, black people women and men), 14.6% declared that maybe in some
cases and 10.2% think that media are not responsible for such a situation. Closely related to this
topic are the sixth and seventh questions to which individuals were asked to say if they believe
that mass media pressure people to have certain body shape and if they felt any kind of
complexion about their physical appearance. 15.7% of the total amount of people declared they
dont believe that mass media pressure people to have a certain body shape, while 84.3% of them
declared that they believe mass media are responsible for certain pressures people feel for not
having certain body shape, by promoting skinny models and actresses, perfect women and men,
and one person said that mass media pressure girls to look like Barbie and boys to look like Ken.
Others sustain that this influence on the society is best seen if we take a closer look at the
percentage of people who made plastic surgeries in the last years. 36.8% declared that they dont
have complexes about their physical appearance and 63.2% say that they still have frustration
about some parts of their bodies. Questions number 12 purpose was to identify what people
think about certain groups that media stereotype or stereotyped in the past. In this respect, people
were asked to write three adjectives that characterize certain groups of people. Thus, about
Islam, the most common answers were disgusting, fear, dangerous, negative, disrespectful,

54
extreme, fixed with religion, indoctrinated, fanatical, evil, threatening, extremists, bastards,
obsessive showing that most people confound Islamic people with terrorists and they see people
coming from those regions as being as described above. And this is not true. As I said before,
terrorists exist, but not all Islamic people are terrorists. It seems that mass media influence a lot
the social perception by implementing fear in peoples hearts by promoting so much the terrors
made by these real extremists and by making guesses about this kind of people. Regarding black
people the most adjectives used to describe them were strong, athletic, massive and violent but
also noisemakers, aggressive, cruel, colorful and poor were used by most of the interrogated
individuals. This indicates that advertisements where black people usually appear as being
athletes are strongly perceived by most of the people as being true in real life. Also the fact that
rap music and movies promote so much an aggressive behavior in the black people communities
are also believed as being true to most of the people.
Concerning men they were mostly characterized as strong, hard working, protective,
macho, sexy, handsome, and good looking. Women were mostly associates with the next
adjectives and nouns: beauty, beautiful, hot, passion, sexual, sensual, sexy, intelligent, delicate
and sweetness. This thing demonstrates that the first things that cross peoples minds when
thinking about the opposite sex is beauty and sexuality and these are the most things promoted
by mass media concerning men and women. Another group of people who was proposed for this
experiment were the Japanese, as they are associated in media with technology, being very
different from us and the most Japanese women are mostly seen as sexual objects. Individuals
answers proved once again that these ideas were successfully taken as true by people, who
associate Japanese with: intelligence, fast, hot women, technological, traditional, yellow, rich,
small, identical, Kama Sutra, beautiful women. And finally the last category to be analyzed was
homosexuality, where I met the most controversial answers. So they are seen like strange, but
also normal, unacceptable but also available, rude but also polite, disgusting, grouse, detestable,
ugly but also beautiful, clean and sinful, funny and illegal, capable of true love and sick and the
examples might go on and on. These differences come from the fact that the individuals I have
interrogated came from so many different parts of the world. But I observed the next thing:
people coming from countries where homosexuality is illegal (Romania, Albania Cameroon, Iran
and Pakistan) thus where this is a taboo subject in mass media except when homosexuals are
criticized, characterized this kind of people with the most drastic words: sinful, disgusting,

55
detestable, bad, strange and so on, but people who come from more liberal countries where
homosexuality is legal (Spain, Brazil, Canada, Belgium and France) so when they have equal
rights and they appear on TV and mass media, people werent so drastic, characterizing them as
being funny, clean, kind, strange, mysterious, polite, normal.
Question number 5 is closely connected to questions number 9 and 10 from the opinion
survey, as I wanted to point out the fact that people who spend lot of time with mass media
perceive promoted violence as being present also in real life (see the subchapter entitled
Violence). But before discussing violence, I would like to focus first on the other aspects that
were analyzed in this question. So concerning sexually transmitted diseases, 34.1% of the
individuals believe that mass media show the truth about this theme, meaning that they are not
exposed so much to contact such a disease. Moreover 39.3% believe that mass media show a true
picture concerning unwanted pregnancies and 28.6% believe that mass media provide the truth
about infant pregnancies. Well, if we take another brief look at the percentage of unwanted
pregnancies, infant pregnancies and people who contact a sexually transmitted disease in real life
versus the percentage mass media show, (see Sexuality), we can strongly suggest that these ideas
make people behave more irresponsible via these issues and have improper attitudes towards
contraceptive methods, thus risking high exposure to sexually transmitted diseases and an
increased possibility of an unwanted pregnancy. Concerning the number of abortions, only
12.1% of the people believe mass media show the real numbers and concerning the number of
divorces, 46.34% have an acceptance attitude towards the percentage offered by mass media. I
analyzed these issues because as I said before in the paper, people who give a lot of time to mass
media are easily influenced to believe the data they promote. Thus, believing that the number of
divorces in media is the same with the one in real life makes people easily accepting this kind of
behavior and even encourages them to make this step more easily. And the last issue I would like
to discuss from this question is the percentage of people who perceive mass media violence as
being real. So, 56.8% of the people agreed that mass media provide a true picture of the violence
in real life, I was very surprised to find out that 100% of the people believe that mass media is
responsible for violent behavior in real life. 73.3% declared that they feel unsafe and threatened
by potential dangers and delinquency even if only 19.7% declared that major violent acts and
delinquencies took place in their neighbors or their cities. Hence, these results show that even if
violent acts or delinquencies rarely happen in the areas where people live, they feel threatened

56
and insecure, always thinking of imminent dangers and possible threatens that may occur, thus
taking mass media violence as being true. I mean, logically they have no reason to feel
threatened if in their cities such actions rarely happen, but if they see it in mass media they
perceive it as real and close to them.
And finally the last question, according to which individuals were asked to say if they
bought things they didnt really needed but were convinced by ads to acquire, 18.2 % declared
that they dont buy things just because they see it exposed if they dont really need it, but 81.1%
of the people declared that they have done this thing out of a number of different reasons: some
out of curiosity, others because they finally were convinced they need the products, others just to
try and see if it really matches the description made by the advertising and so on so forth. But the
important thing here is not the reasons people behave this way and why they bought the products
in the end, but the fact that they were convinced to buy them, being influenced, manipulated and
encouraged to act as true consumerists.

57
 CONCLUSIONS

Mass media offers what seems to be a real representation of the world. It rarely happens
to question the veracity of the information provided by media and most of the time we are
convinced that the world is exactly the same as television, magazines or internet show.
Everything is true because we can see the facts with our own eyes. But behind all these things we
could see that mass media actually influence our attitudes and behaviors, influence the way we
perceive the world, manipulate and transform us according to the standards set up by them. The
strange thing is that everybody accepts the idea that media influence other people lives but not
his / her own, because when asked, they agree with their influential character but are equally
eager to point out that media have no influence on their behavior.
Or we could see how sexuality lowers the lifes quality, how violence in the media is
responsible in some cases for violent behaviors in real life, how stereotypes affect peoples way
of thinking and even acting and how advertisement, commercials and movies encourage us to
become thoroughpaced consumerists. We could see that AIDS, HIV, bulimia, eating disorders
rapes, bullying and crimes are closely related to the information sent by mass media. All in all
most of the time we imitate what we see because we see it so often. But I think that we should
take a closer look in ourselves and to try to fight not against mass media, but in making it a tool
for a better education and influence in a positive way. Because the techniques they use might be
very effective if used in a good way, as president Obama declared:

We do not have to accept what we see today as inevitable. We can all work together to make
media a place where big ideas and great debates are communicated. We owe this much to
ourselves and we certainly owe this to our children.

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31. http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm 06. Aprilie 2009

Documentaries:
1. The Merchants of Cool, February 27, 2001 produced by Barak Goodman, Rachel Dretzin
2. The Persuaders, November 9, 2003, directed by Barak Goodman and Rachel Dretzin,
written by Barak Goodman and Douglas Rushkoff, produced by Rachel Dretzin, Barak
Goodman and Muriel Soenens

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