Media and the Effects it plays on Teens

Media in today’s world is everywhere. There is no place you can go to get away from it, even for just a minute. Look back fifty years ago and there was only television. It was not even popular at that time. Besides not being popular, TV shows could not use profanity or the actor and the actress could not be in the same bed or in a movie with a woman or a man unless he or she was their spouse. Today’s media has come a long way from that. The original standard has been lost. Media affects the lives of everyone in the world. It has come a long way in just fifty years. It’s only going to get bigger and better. Also, the media will become more and more available to more people throughout the world. Media is a good thing, but it can be harmful to teenagers, specifically in regard to their view of sex, health, and violence. Media plays a huge role when dealing with sex. Basically, everywhere you look, sex can be found in the media; especially on television, movies and the Internet. Now, more than ever, it is seen in music. All most all the time, in this day and age, the most popular song on the radio or on iTunes has a sexual connotation in some way or the other. Carma Haley Shoemaker is a nurse by trade and a writer by nature and also the author of “The Music Made Me Do It”, says that, “As today 's music is more diverse than ever, issues concerning lyrics, song titles, album and CD covers – as well as the artists themselves – have become the center of controversy.”1 Over the last thirty years, there has been a trend in the T.V. media with how much sex is shown on television. Barrie Gunter Director of Centre, Department of Media and Communication, Professor of Mass Communications and the author of Media Sex: What Are the Issues? shows a table from 1989 of the sexual incidents on television from men to women and from women to men being 7.23 hours for men to women and the 4.17 hours for women to men. This was hours per day that some form of sexuality was shown in 1989

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