Media... Oh Media...
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Author: Dr. Saravanan Sundaresan
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Date: 10/03/2008
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There are tons are
ways to express the reflection of our minds, real-life occurrences or just our
imaginations. In the olden days,
paintings were one of the major means of expression. Before the invention of paper, it was the Palmyra leaves and nail
soaked in dye used as pen. We then
switched to papers a few centuries back.
Paper ruled the media world even up until about five six decades
ago. Then it was the radio, the telephone
and then photography. But today, we have
movies, cable-TV, highly advanced photography, videos, video-games, computers,
cell phone, internet and what not. There
is no end to the list. The media world
has seen a massive growth as never before in a very short period of time. Today it has too much of a strong hold on us
that it pretty much dominates the entire human race. Can we imagine our life today without any of
these gadgets? It is almost impossible
you could say. From cradle to grave,
media plays a significant role in each and every one of our lives. Gone are the days when media was used mainly
for official purposes or for very limited entertainment purposes. But today, it is more of an obsession to one
or more of these devices. Cell phone,
cable-TV and video games top the list in addicting people. Here, we will analyze some of the major changes
that media has introduced in our life.
How children are impacted by media? Today, many children don’t eat or go to sleep without watching TV. Food that is consumed without paying attention to the food itself is more like a slow poison. This applies for everyone and not just for the kids. Kids in the age group 5-15 are supposed to play games that would physically exert them. Instead we see many of them resorting to video-games. All that functions there is the mind and the fingers. There is no doubt that outdoor games immensely help the children to grow stronger and healthier. Bones and muscles get stronger and bigger giving them a fit body and also resistance from diseases. On top of all that, when we are physically tired, we get sound sleep. Only if the mind is tired and the body is not, we will never be able to sleep well. The video-games and the TV take away all these advantages from our children and us. They don’t just stop at spoiling their physical health but also terribly impact their mental health too. The amount of adult contents and violence in almost every one of the shows or games, corrupt the young minds when they are really too young to take all that. These things affect the minds of adults too just as bad as the kids or may be even worse. We will see that later. With the kids, it the best time of their life when they should be learning all the good things, have as much as pleasant experiences as possible. Instead, every time I hear kids singing the worst possible lyrics from a music album or a movie, my heart bleeds. There is as much pain, when an eighty year old grandpa dances for those same corruptive creations. Second childhood is when one should have no thoughts other than God. They should have way passed the materialistic pleasures of life for their age.
Teenagers are the worst affected of all due to these gadgets. Today we can hardly find a college student without a cell phone. A significant portion of their time is spent on talking to friends on the phone and sending text messages to cable-TV channels. They spend the pleasant sleeping hours watching TV and use cell phone for their pillow. There are no words to describe the physical and mental hazards caused by the amount of heat and electro magnetic radiations generated by these cell phones. These waves fight with the waves generated by our brains thereby not allowing us to sleep sound. Our mind keeps working without our knowledge. Modern research recommends not to have ‘any’ electronic equipments (let alone cell phone) in our bedroom because they hinder our sleep. From one TV per home, we are moving towards one TV per room, not leaving bathrooms too. Research also says, keeping laptops turned on, on our laps for long hours and hanging cell phone on our hips, both affect men’s reproductive health. Yes! Men lose their ability to procreate because the sperms die unable to take the heat from these devices. A cell-phone in your shirt pocket, meddles with your heartbeat. Next, it’s the internet! As much as we have shrunk the world to no more than a paperweight like marble on our table, there is as much incorrect usage as there possibly can be. Whether kids use internet to do their education related research, they definitely use it to view adult contents. There is countless number of adult websites. And the number of people that get addicted to them is also countless.
Cable-TV, the worst culprit of all, we could say. We have hundreds of channels already and we keep adding more and more everyday. They say we should have as much positive vibration as possible around us to help us lead life the right way. Is it practically possible today in this media crazy world? Non-stop TV at home, mega television serials not just a handful but in dozens just in one channel! Non-stop movies, music channels, violence, gruesome scenes and adult contents that know no bounds even Saints would fall for the temptations. There are also some useful channels like Discovery, Animal Planet etc. But, on a comparison basis, these good channels are no match to the amount of negative vibrations the other channels create. If one channel can create so much bad vibrations around us, then you can imagine the amount of bad vibrations these hundreds of channels create around the world. Do the math and you will know the answer to the question – creating positive vibrations in our homes, is it possible? The answer is still ‘Yes’! If we turned off our TV sets permanently! With cable-TV being the most popular media around the world, we could use it to spread as much good as possible around us. Are we doing it? Sadly, NO!
Today’s Cinema! What a nightmare they are in terms of contents! Whether there is storyline or not, there is this special track for showing skin. I’m personally a movie buff myself but I hardly go to theaters. Wondering how? I watch movies only if it has had a great review and people talk about it so well around the world. That much filtering I do. Dozens of movies from my regional language and movies like Titanic, Cast Away, Negotiator, A Time to Kill, Green Mile and many other such terrific creations are my all-time favorites (less the adult contents of course!). But how many of those types of movies are made? May be, one in a few hundreds? What about the rest? It’s all garbage spreading as much rotten stuff as possible, corrupting the vulnerable human minds. Tons of culturally unhealthy materials are being produced everywhere around the world, everyday and we don’t seem to be doing anything about it. We are getting more and more liberal by the day even in conservative countries like India. Freedom of expression should be allowed only to the extent when it does not have a negative impact on the whole society. There are hundreds of examples of movies from the middle of the last century, where even holding hands wasn’t a part of any scene to bring out the completeness in the expression. These movies were block-busters in those days. Today, lack of creative thinking but the urge to create something, with ‘money’ as the only driving factor, has led to expressing anything that comes to one’s mind.
Let us now see how all of these profoundly impact every common man on earth. Things around us that make a deep impact on our minds have a significant role in the making or breaking of a person. This is a scientific truth. Today, there is no life without media. Having taken so many different forms and the amount of adult contents at its peak, it attracts each one of us so badly. Sexual feeling is a common thing for every living being on earth. But it should come naturally and only at appropriate times. Nothing should be used as a catalyst to induce these feelings. Since we do that in a ton of different ways, we see the following results: people with money they buy sex; people strong enough to bully others and unable to control the desires end up committing rapes; common people end up having multiple sex partners; teenagers who are at the most vulnerable stage of their life, experiment things thus going in the wrong path of life; increasing sexual harassments. All of these have only one place to end – various sex-related diseases. Some people argue saying ‘that is why there are condoms freely available everywhere and also other means to have safe sex’. This is like saying I will knowingly spread thorns all around the place and one should wear boots to avoid the consequence. Every problem has a root. If we don’t address it at that level, there is literally no point with the temporary fixes. In the long run, we will only end up creating a monster. In the IT industry, RCA is a very famous terminology. It means, Root Cause Analysis. Whenever there is a major production issue that cost the company dearly, they immediately open a RCA meeting. The point of the meeting is to do a thorough analysis as to what was the root cause of the problem. How it happened, why it happened, what were the contributing factors that led to the problem so on and so forth… Until they get to the bottom of it, the case never gets closed and it gets escalated higher and higher until a ‘permanent’ fix is found. After all, it is a silly machine and at the worst we may lose a few millions. But we pay so much attention to it and won’t sleep until we resolve it. In the case of media with adult contents, it is causing a great havoc around the world, affecting millions of lives, our own children and our whole future. Shouldn’t we be doing an RCA for this problem?
Some say, one should have self-control and cannot blame on the surroundings. Unless we are machines, we are slaves to our emotions. Desire, anger, love, sorrow and all other emotions are all part of a human life. Aren’t we ruled by them more than anything else? If everyone is capable of controlling all the emotions then there wouldn’t be life on earth. Everyone will be sitting in a cave high up in the Himalayas and meditating. It would be so popular we would then have real-estate boards hanging right outside these caves – LOL. A similar argument can be raised about the amount of violence we see in the media today. Bloodshed scenes and any other such contents create depression in our minds in the long run is what researchers say. We can bring out ‘Love’ in the media but not ‘Lust’. There are tons of epics, plays and stories in our homeland that bring out ‘Love’. But even those were kept in poetic forms so they are not easily understood by everyone especially children. Our forefathers knew that only when one attains a certain level of maturity one should explore this area. Adult contents of all forms should be completely eradicated from the media.
We keep it a practice to blame the West for all the culture related issues that we have today. We need to point fingers at someone other than us right? :)). With satellite TV and the internet, the entire world is right in our home. Under such circumstances, it is very easy to shove the blame on someone else. But, how about owning up to our mistakes? Did we have a perfect society all along and only the West changed it for the worst? If we thought so, we are wrong. If we read Chankya’s Artha Sasthra (Laws governing people) written 2500 years ago, we will know several facts related to this issue. Why were there laws pertaining to sexual relationships written that long ago while a major portion of earth was still unexplored and unconquered? Our forefathers knew that no matter what, a society is always a mixture of good and bad and it needs to be governed by strict laws at all times to keep the bad under constant check. Other than true Saints, every human being is bound by emotions at all times. As people mature, they learn to control some of these. This has been true right from the creation of this universe and will be true until the end of it. There is no doubt about it. There is no justice in simply blaming a certain section of the society if something is not right in front of us. I have traveled to many places in the West and I do know they realize the seriousness of the problem and are making efforts to resolve them. To be more precise, I know there are books written on the effects of adult contents in media on society, camps are conducted, political leaders get actively involved and contribute to the cause. So, rather than pointing fingers at someone, we should start working on fixing the problem that we have in front of us. Do whatever it takes to fix it, should be the attitude.
It would also be totally absurd to say that media is the ‘only’ culprit that spreads several incorrect messages to the communities, misguiding the people in the wrong path and that everything was perfectly ok in our society before that. That would be the worst lie ever! Like I said before, people are people no matter what era we are in. The desire for women, money and power has been there since the days of Adam and Eve. But as long as an individual fulfills his/her desires without harming others, it is his or her own personal matter. No one has the right to interfere in that. As we see, even in those olden days, there were ways to punish the offenders when it became a crime. An individual committing a sin affects only him and may be just a few others that are closely associated with him. Things that happen within the four walls end within the four walls and the impact of it is negligible to the outside world. But we have to admit that, if the filthiest thoughts of humans take forms such as movies, photographs and what not, it reaches millions of people very quickly and creates a terrible and lasting effect. Humans ruled by emotions most of time are bound to make mistakes when they are in their weakest moments of life, provoked by what had created that lasting effect. In that sense, media has done its part to corrupt the society. All the creators have to understand this fact. Scientists spend their entire life in inventing every one of the master pieces that we see and enjoy today. Before we use them, we should ask ourselves the question - is it really fair that we use it for some negative consequence. It is not only a Government’s duty to ensure that its people are going in the right path of life, it is every individual’s responsibility and commitment in life to contribute towards that path.
Pen is mightier than sword is an outdated saying. In the modern world, visual media is mightier than anything. In our homeland, many glass buildings for sky scrappers are raised in great numbers at a great pace just like any other country. But at that same time, there is an untold fear that the lights might go out on our culture at that same pace. Let’s build as many glass buildings as we want. But we should also realize that our culture is like the most sensitive glass structure we could have ever built and breaking that would break everything else. Let the creations of the media world be in a way that would protect it and not destroy it. Otherwise our place will become nothing more than a burial ground.
A ‘controlled’ media is what we desperately need today and our world would be much more peaceful if we did that!
How children are impacted by media? Today, many children don’t eat or go to sleep without watching TV. Food that is consumed without paying attention to the food itself is more like a slow poison. This applies for everyone and not just for the kids. Kids in the age group 5-15 are supposed to play games that would physically exert them. Instead we see many of them resorting to video-games. All that functions there is the mind and the fingers. There is no doubt that outdoor games immensely help the children to grow stronger and healthier. Bones and muscles get stronger and bigger giving them a fit body and also resistance from diseases. On top of all that, when we are physically tired, we get sound sleep. Only if the mind is tired and the body is not, we will never be able to sleep well. The video-games and the TV take away all these advantages from our children and us. They don’t just stop at spoiling their physical health but also terribly impact their mental health too. The amount of adult contents and violence in almost every one of the shows or games, corrupt the young minds when they are really too young to take all that. These things affect the minds of adults too just as bad as the kids or may be even worse. We will see that later. With the kids, it the best time of their life when they should be learning all the good things, have as much as pleasant experiences as possible. Instead, every time I hear kids singing the worst possible lyrics from a music album or a movie, my heart bleeds. There is as much pain, when an eighty year old grandpa dances for those same corruptive creations. Second childhood is when one should have no thoughts other than God. They should have way passed the materialistic pleasures of life for their age.
Teenagers are the worst affected of all due to these gadgets. Today we can hardly find a college student without a cell phone. A significant portion of their time is spent on talking to friends on the phone and sending text messages to cable-TV channels. They spend the pleasant sleeping hours watching TV and use cell phone for their pillow. There are no words to describe the physical and mental hazards caused by the amount of heat and electro magnetic radiations generated by these cell phones. These waves fight with the waves generated by our brains thereby not allowing us to sleep sound. Our mind keeps working without our knowledge. Modern research recommends not to have ‘any’ electronic equipments (let alone cell phone) in our bedroom because they hinder our sleep. From one TV per home, we are moving towards one TV per room, not leaving bathrooms too. Research also says, keeping laptops turned on, on our laps for long hours and hanging cell phone on our hips, both affect men’s reproductive health. Yes! Men lose their ability to procreate because the sperms die unable to take the heat from these devices. A cell-phone in your shirt pocket, meddles with your heartbeat. Next, it’s the internet! As much as we have shrunk the world to no more than a paperweight like marble on our table, there is as much incorrect usage as there possibly can be. Whether kids use internet to do their education related research, they definitely use it to view adult contents. There is countless number of adult websites. And the number of people that get addicted to them is also countless.
Cable-TV, the worst culprit of all, we could say. We have hundreds of channels already and we keep adding more and more everyday. They say we should have as much positive vibration as possible around us to help us lead life the right way. Is it practically possible today in this media crazy world? Non-stop TV at home, mega television serials not just a handful but in dozens just in one channel! Non-stop movies, music channels, violence, gruesome scenes and adult contents that know no bounds even Saints would fall for the temptations. There are also some useful channels like Discovery, Animal Planet etc. But, on a comparison basis, these good channels are no match to the amount of negative vibrations the other channels create. If one channel can create so much bad vibrations around us, then you can imagine the amount of bad vibrations these hundreds of channels create around the world. Do the math and you will know the answer to the question – creating positive vibrations in our homes, is it possible? The answer is still ‘Yes’! If we turned off our TV sets permanently! With cable-TV being the most popular media around the world, we could use it to spread as much good as possible around us. Are we doing it? Sadly, NO!
Today’s Cinema! What a nightmare they are in terms of contents! Whether there is storyline or not, there is this special track for showing skin. I’m personally a movie buff myself but I hardly go to theaters. Wondering how? I watch movies only if it has had a great review and people talk about it so well around the world. That much filtering I do. Dozens of movies from my regional language and movies like Titanic, Cast Away, Negotiator, A Time to Kill, Green Mile and many other such terrific creations are my all-time favorites (less the adult contents of course!). But how many of those types of movies are made? May be, one in a few hundreds? What about the rest? It’s all garbage spreading as much rotten stuff as possible, corrupting the vulnerable human minds. Tons of culturally unhealthy materials are being produced everywhere around the world, everyday and we don’t seem to be doing anything about it. We are getting more and more liberal by the day even in conservative countries like India. Freedom of expression should be allowed only to the extent when it does not have a negative impact on the whole society. There are hundreds of examples of movies from the middle of the last century, where even holding hands wasn’t a part of any scene to bring out the completeness in the expression. These movies were block-busters in those days. Today, lack of creative thinking but the urge to create something, with ‘money’ as the only driving factor, has led to expressing anything that comes to one’s mind.
Let us now see how all of these profoundly impact every common man on earth. Things around us that make a deep impact on our minds have a significant role in the making or breaking of a person. This is a scientific truth. Today, there is no life without media. Having taken so many different forms and the amount of adult contents at its peak, it attracts each one of us so badly. Sexual feeling is a common thing for every living being on earth. But it should come naturally and only at appropriate times. Nothing should be used as a catalyst to induce these feelings. Since we do that in a ton of different ways, we see the following results: people with money they buy sex; people strong enough to bully others and unable to control the desires end up committing rapes; common people end up having multiple sex partners; teenagers who are at the most vulnerable stage of their life, experiment things thus going in the wrong path of life; increasing sexual harassments. All of these have only one place to end – various sex-related diseases. Some people argue saying ‘that is why there are condoms freely available everywhere and also other means to have safe sex’. This is like saying I will knowingly spread thorns all around the place and one should wear boots to avoid the consequence. Every problem has a root. If we don’t address it at that level, there is literally no point with the temporary fixes. In the long run, we will only end up creating a monster. In the IT industry, RCA is a very famous terminology. It means, Root Cause Analysis. Whenever there is a major production issue that cost the company dearly, they immediately open a RCA meeting. The point of the meeting is to do a thorough analysis as to what was the root cause of the problem. How it happened, why it happened, what were the contributing factors that led to the problem so on and so forth… Until they get to the bottom of it, the case never gets closed and it gets escalated higher and higher until a ‘permanent’ fix is found. After all, it is a silly machine and at the worst we may lose a few millions. But we pay so much attention to it and won’t sleep until we resolve it. In the case of media with adult contents, it is causing a great havoc around the world, affecting millions of lives, our own children and our whole future. Shouldn’t we be doing an RCA for this problem?
Some say, one should have self-control and cannot blame on the surroundings. Unless we are machines, we are slaves to our emotions. Desire, anger, love, sorrow and all other emotions are all part of a human life. Aren’t we ruled by them more than anything else? If everyone is capable of controlling all the emotions then there wouldn’t be life on earth. Everyone will be sitting in a cave high up in the Himalayas and meditating. It would be so popular we would then have real-estate boards hanging right outside these caves – LOL. A similar argument can be raised about the amount of violence we see in the media today. Bloodshed scenes and any other such contents create depression in our minds in the long run is what researchers say. We can bring out ‘Love’ in the media but not ‘Lust’. There are tons of epics, plays and stories in our homeland that bring out ‘Love’. But even those were kept in poetic forms so they are not easily understood by everyone especially children. Our forefathers knew that only when one attains a certain level of maturity one should explore this area. Adult contents of all forms should be completely eradicated from the media.
We keep it a practice to blame the West for all the culture related issues that we have today. We need to point fingers at someone other than us right? :)). With satellite TV and the internet, the entire world is right in our home. Under such circumstances, it is very easy to shove the blame on someone else. But, how about owning up to our mistakes? Did we have a perfect society all along and only the West changed it for the worst? If we thought so, we are wrong. If we read Chankya’s Artha Sasthra (Laws governing people) written 2500 years ago, we will know several facts related to this issue. Why were there laws pertaining to sexual relationships written that long ago while a major portion of earth was still unexplored and unconquered? Our forefathers knew that no matter what, a society is always a mixture of good and bad and it needs to be governed by strict laws at all times to keep the bad under constant check. Other than true Saints, every human being is bound by emotions at all times. As people mature, they learn to control some of these. This has been true right from the creation of this universe and will be true until the end of it. There is no doubt about it. There is no justice in simply blaming a certain section of the society if something is not right in front of us. I have traveled to many places in the West and I do know they realize the seriousness of the problem and are making efforts to resolve them. To be more precise, I know there are books written on the effects of adult contents in media on society, camps are conducted, political leaders get actively involved and contribute to the cause. So, rather than pointing fingers at someone, we should start working on fixing the problem that we have in front of us. Do whatever it takes to fix it, should be the attitude.
It would also be totally absurd to say that media is the ‘only’ culprit that spreads several incorrect messages to the communities, misguiding the people in the wrong path and that everything was perfectly ok in our society before that. That would be the worst lie ever! Like I said before, people are people no matter what era we are in. The desire for women, money and power has been there since the days of Adam and Eve. But as long as an individual fulfills his/her desires without harming others, it is his or her own personal matter. No one has the right to interfere in that. As we see, even in those olden days, there were ways to punish the offenders when it became a crime. An individual committing a sin affects only him and may be just a few others that are closely associated with him. Things that happen within the four walls end within the four walls and the impact of it is negligible to the outside world. But we have to admit that, if the filthiest thoughts of humans take forms such as movies, photographs and what not, it reaches millions of people very quickly and creates a terrible and lasting effect. Humans ruled by emotions most of time are bound to make mistakes when they are in their weakest moments of life, provoked by what had created that lasting effect. In that sense, media has done its part to corrupt the society. All the creators have to understand this fact. Scientists spend their entire life in inventing every one of the master pieces that we see and enjoy today. Before we use them, we should ask ourselves the question - is it really fair that we use it for some negative consequence. It is not only a Government’s duty to ensure that its people are going in the right path of life, it is every individual’s responsibility and commitment in life to contribute towards that path.
Pen is mightier than sword is an outdated saying. In the modern world, visual media is mightier than anything. In our homeland, many glass buildings for sky scrappers are raised in great numbers at a great pace just like any other country. But at that same time, there is an untold fear that the lights might go out on our culture at that same pace. Let’s build as many glass buildings as we want. But we should also realize that our culture is like the most sensitive glass structure we could have ever built and breaking that would break everything else. Let the creations of the media world be in a way that would protect it and not destroy it. Otherwise our place will become nothing more than a burial ground.
A ‘controlled’ media is what we desperately need today and our world would be much more peaceful if we did that!
