As social media becomes more accessible to the general public, it is high time we ask ourselves about the ideas that media inculcates in to the society, more specifically the backbone of the future, the Teens.

In recent years, action movies and series have made successful box-office hits, it is safe to say that it has been a popular choice amongst the thriving public. Now, there is no problem in the fact that more action films are being made and released, in fact it is good for the industry. The problem is that these movies and shows with such gruesome, macabre and ghastly scenes are being made available for today’s teens to watch. The national library of medicine (1) addresses/concludes that television and film violence led to immediate violent behaviour in individual children further adding how watching dramatic violence on television and film affects aggressive thoughts and emotions, causing aggressive behaviour. 

It's unsettling to think that we are leading ourselves into a potentially hazardous future, thus we must ask ourselves if we are doing everything we can as a society to protect our youth?

An infamous example of inappropriate display of media violence you probably might have heard of is the 2021 Korean series, the ‘Squid Game’ .  The Squid game was a successful release on Netflix in over 90+ countries, which also went viral on other platforms with its extremely violent and graphic scenes .

The 'Squid Game series' has become a global legend since and influenced the whole world, thanks to social media. In the light of this information, previously stated facts regarding the violence is reinforced by  Akan et al. 1994 (2) who conducted research into this topic and discovered that most adolescents and teenagers who are exposed to scenes of violent scenes in the series resort to peer bullying by imitating these scenes ! Akan et al.1994 continues by outlining how such violent series decrease teenagers and adolescents ‘ sensitivity to violence’. This leads me to conclude that violence influences the young brain to adopt and normalize this violent paradigm of anger, blood, hate and violence . Further promoting these young adults to emulate these bad sentiments in the outside world, further hurting their own lives and endangering their own and others' safety.

In my opinion some solutions we can adopt as a society is that we should educate the youth and public about media violence and its consequences, making sure to appropriately inform teenagers about the incorrect and dangerous display of violence that could lead to harmful situations and malevolent impersonation of the same. Another solution to the promotion of media violence is that the British Board of Film Classification should consider having higher age rating for films with extreme gore, violence and death . We as a society and a community should also strive to make such content hard to access for teenagers and children for their own good.

 

references: (1)- www.nlm.nih.gov / (2)- Akan, Y. (2021) ‘Investigation of the effect of the “violence reduction psychoeducation program” on anger, violence and aggression levels of students’, International Journal of Progressive Education, 17(1), pp. 513–533. doi:10.29329/ijpe.2021.329.32.