Sunday, February 22, 2015

Interactive Media, Like Video Games, Has A Larger Impact on Human Behavior Than Passive Media, Like Television.


Interactive Media, Like Video Games, Has A Larger Impact on Human Behavior Than Passive Media, Like Television.
By Timmy Kelley

          Forms of media have become increasingly important in lives of people and influence people significantly. Some forms of media, like video games, allow users to be more personally involved and are much more interactive than other media forms, like television, a more passive mode of media. People who are personally and actively involved in their media, like playing video games, are impacted and influenced more than users who use less involved media, like television. 


           The world that we live in today can easily be labeled as an information society, which simply means that information production and knowledge has become the most important aspect. People are constantly on different forms of media in hopes of obtaining all the information that they can. However, most people don’t realize the impact that media has on our thoughts and behaviors. That is the idea behind the concept of technological determinism, the belief that technology causes certain human behaviors. Whether we like it or not, our media usage changes us, for better or worse, without any cognitive recognition that a change in our behavior is occurring. 
            All media has the ability to influence behavior, and this can be shown by looking at the link between aggression and watching television. There are a lot of aggressive television shows and sports games that anybody with a television can watch at any time. People don’t realize that even by just watching violent acts on the television, their behavior is slightly changed, and the more television that is watched, the larger its effect. According to a New York Times article, investigators at Columbia University performed a study and found a link between watching television and behaving aggressively. The researchers followed children in 707 families in two New York counties over 17 years. Their results showed that adolescents and young adults who watched television for more than seven hours a week had an increased likelihood of committing aggressive acts later in life. Just by simply watching television, the subject’s attitudes and behaviors are changed by what they see on the screen, in this case resulting in aggressive behavior later on in life. 
           However, not all form of media have the same effect on people due to the amount of personal engagement involved. Video games are one such form of media where people are actually controlling the actions of the characters they’re playing as. Any time you want your character to shoot a gun or kill a zombie, the person has to physically press a button to tell the character to perform such an act. When simply watching a violent movie, people are removed from all the violent acts and not directly involved in them and they still have an impact. But when playing video games, people become actively involved in the actions, causing them to have a larger impact on real-life behaviors as video games can tend to desensitize us to the actual violence that is occurring. An article on PBS about the link between video games and violence quotes Rowell Huesmann, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, saying “The important thing is repetition. I think any child can play Grand Theft Auto or a first-person shooter a few times, and it’s not going to have much effect. But if they play day in and day out, over a period of years, any psychologist who understands the power of observational learning is going to find it hard to believe that it’s not going to have a major effect on increasing risk.” The fact that video games are an interactive medium, as compared to television which is more passive and less interactive, amplifies the influence that it can have over people, especially children who are still growing and learning how to behave in the world. 
           The major research focus associated with video games is how they make people more aggressive. But the fact that they are such an influential form of media should be viewed as a positive thing instead of a negative. Instead of researching how they make us angrier, psychologists should investigate how we can use it to improve aspects of our behavior. Why can’t we harness video games ability to influence people, and use it to help teach kids both right from wrong or use it as a way to make boring lessons more interesting? As technology continues to improve exponentially from year to year, we need to continue to improve our understanding of how it impacts us and our behaviors.
           Form of media have, and will continue to influence human behavior. Highly interactive mediums such as video games have a larger influence due to the amount of interaction and decision making that is not present when simply watching television. Hopefully, we can find a way to use video games as a way to improve our lives and influence behavior in a positive way.

 

1 comment:

  1. Your headline tells us exactly what you talk about in your article. Although you could of avoided adding in the part of interactive media and passive media and just said video games and television because the extra wording can be distracting and unnecessary, especially since you are writing to a fifth grade level audience. Your writing is very clear for what the original article was stating. You clearly get to the point and describe why video games/television is causing aggressive behavior especially in younger adults. The original writing includes more statistical data that could have been beneficial to add to your paper but overall you covered the main points of the experiment conducted and thoroughly accounted the data received. Also, you could of added a caption under the picture to express a little bit more or you could of used another image that depicted anger/aggression that could of resulted from such television shows/video games. Overall, you got across the main points and wrote a very well written article to summarize what the main article was expressing.

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