Media Violence And Youth Essay

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Media Violence and its Exposure on Youth.
Teenage years are some of the toughest times for personality development as all the information teenagers gain during that time have a strong influence on their future behavior. Today teenagers spend almost all of their time surfing the web, watching movies, listening to music, and playing video games. However the media content has changed extensively, and the amount of violent elements is rising year by year. Psychologists all over the world explore the influence of violent media on teenagers’ behavior admitting the possible serious consequences of this type of media. Yet, it is hard to define media violence, as each type of media explains it differently. According to the Cambridge Dictionary violence
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TV shows, movies, ads, and music lyrics’ are full of violent content in different genres – comedy, fantasy, and even drama. The idea of a constant war between good and bad went far away from simple explanation of these terms. Now the line between those two has blurred, and variety of movies, TV shows and music lyrics’ describe negative characters in more sympathizing way, so that teenagers are trying to copy their behaviors in the real life. No doubt, media violence is yet only one of the factors that can cause aggression and brutality among youth. The environment they live in also plays a huge role in building teenager’s behavioral model; family conflicts, school problems, lack of confidence, and number of other reasons can make a young person violent. Nevertheless, the quantity of violent scenes in movies and different TV shows can cause a wrong perception of the relationships between people. Cruelty in media influences the emotional development of teenagers, offering them the distorted image of human behavior. If the short-term exposure of media violence would cause physically and verbally aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts and emotions, the long term could be physical assaults and possible spouse

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