Negative Influences from the Media

From our Introductory Post:

“The righteous have sat back and allowed the wicked to take over our relationships to God, families, churches, governments, schools and colleges, journalism, entertainment, sports, sciences, and a whole litany of other endeavors in our society.”

Families – Threats – Negative Influences from the Media

In our previous post we considered the topic of Threats to Families, specifically Divorce. We will now take a look at another threat to the family, Negative Influences from the Media.

Marshall McLuhan, a futurist or philosopher of the 1960s wrote a piece in which he stated, “The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” Parents are increasingly aware of this in their children in today’s world. In fact, children seem to be lost in their iPods, G3s, cell phones, or whatever.

The dictionary definition of mass media, “any forms of communication, such as the press, television, radio, and motion pictures, which reach large numbers of people,” demonstrates the scale of the problem with the negative influence on families. Influence is “the power of persons or things to act on others, seen only in its effects.” Influence, in its verb form, works to produce “change the nature or behavior of.” In the case of today’s media the change is not for the better.

Although the mass media is influential in the life of the family, it has become irrelevant because it is sending messages that are “not important or meaningful.” In other words a family spending a lot of time interacting with mass media is wasting valuable time attempting to recover positive messages from irrelevance.

I suppose there are some good things running through our sewer systems on occasion or, perhaps, buried in dumpsters and landfills. Do we spend time cruising through the sewers or mining dumpsters and landfills in order to recover the few “gems” that might be there? Anyone doing this would not readily admit it for fear of being declared insane. Why do we continue allowing and even encouraging our families to cruise the sewers and mine the dumpsters and landfills of the mass media?

Summary

This post has examined Negative Influences from the Media as a major threat to families. Our next post will take a look at another threat to families, Materialism.

I remain yours in the name of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Name above every name.

“Mr. Phil”