Blog 3: Prosocial Media

Prosocial media is aimed at being socially helpful (altruism, friendliness, acceptance, cooperation) or personally helpful (calming fears, healthy eating, safe sex).  The Children's Television Act of 1990 mandated that there must be a minimum of 3 hours of educational television per week.  Shows such as Barney encouraged children to be clean, place nice, and work well with others.  Barney, and other shows, use Social Cognitive Theory to give positive reinforcement so that a particular good action can be imitated.  While these notions work for children, teenagers are less-likely to be helpful because they are more egocentric.

Adults, meanwhile, tend to react to televised characters as they would real people with likability, perceived realism, and perceived homophily.  Another part of prosocial media is the parasocial element, which involves learning about marginalized groups through mediated messages.  If one has a positive experience with an individual in a minority, his or her behavior with be altered and he or she will be motivated to seek out more interactions.  Also, those experiences will carry over to real interactions with people of that marginalized group.

It seems, given these sets of beliefs, that children and adults are influenced by media, while teenagers are not.  However, this seems to be untrue, because teenagers who play violent video games have long been theorized to have been impacted by their gaming.  There is no doubt that a sizable portion of gamers are teens and violent video games are some of the most popular titles.  Unfortunately, simply button-mashing and making a character kill and maim on a screen definitely seems to have an impact, especially those games that focus on stylizing the violence so that it appears "cool" instead of disturbing.  When the game MadWorld came out for the Nintendo Wii, it offered a double-dose of offensiveness.  Not only did players act out the kills using the Wii remote, but they were also rewarded for killing creatively, using elements such as street signs, chainsaws, and baseball bats.  Given the fact that the game portrays this violence in a comical setting because of how over-the-top it is, the developers intended for gamers to be able to distinguish it as such.  However, impressionable teens undoubtedly focus more on the violence in and of itself than in the context of the game.  Even though the game has an M-rating, which requires the buyer to be 17-years old to buy it, many parents don't pay enough attention and simply indulge their child's wishes.  My 13-year old neighbor plays the games Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach on a regular basis and, not surprisingly, has occasional violent outbursts.  However, whose fault is it?  Is it the game producers, parents, or the kids, who are responsible for what teenagers are exposed to in terms of violent video games?