At the end of his lament, the puzzled child turns to his father and says, "But, Daddy, when it's so bad, why don't you just change the channel?" This Brazilian parable makes us wonder whether the media view of the world has become more real than the real world itself.

This modern parable makes us understand how reality for many is what the media recognise as real. For many young people and children it is people like Sachin Tendulkar and Shah Rukh Khan who are the heroes and not people like Medha Patkar or Mohammed Yunus. These heroes or let's call them "celebrities", have captured the hearts and minds of the young because of the media. The media control our lives in many similar ways. First of all we have to recognise and become aware of the fact that today we are living in a media environment and we should be prepared to live in this environment. The media are everywhere in our society. They are there in our homes, on the streets (hoardings, posters etc.), in our cars and through our mobile phones media walk with us and talk to us. They are no longer constrained by geographical boundaries or technological limitations. Though it has not created the "global village", we can speak of global markets and global, dominant cultures. And today with the Internet, we have entered into another new, exciting world.

Today the media are making increasing demands on our time, they help define our patterns of leisure and entertainment, and they play a role in our social life. They present us with overwhelming amounts of information and images, about ourselves, others, society, culture etc. They serve to define what is of political concern, of economic importance and cultural interest to us. The media select for us. They tell us what to eat, where to go, what to buy, what to wear, how to look attractive and how to live our lives. They set our agenda and tell us what is important and what is trivial by what they take note of what they ignore. The powerful images that we experience in the mass media shape not only our perception of reality and events, but also the events themselves. We are controlled by the media. We are controlled by the entertainment they offer.

Today we constantly move between the real world (our flesh and blood world) and the mediated world (what comes through the media). Increasingly we think and talk about people we have not met, places we have not seen. In our conversations we talk about the rich and the powerful and other fantasies. Television has, in McLuhan's terminology, "extended" dramatically our access to news and other stories. But just as cars have weakened our legs, the "extended", reliance on television can weaken our ability to tell and hear our own stories or news. We receive facts, opinions, and perceptions, from newsreaders, commentators and other media personalities. Often mediated reality can be more real than reality itself. The mass media tell us what to think about. They shape our perception and present people with certain ways of seeing and making sense of social reality. The media create a new environment for us.

The Church document Aetatis Novae says: "In the years since Inter Mirifica and Communio et Progressio appeared, people have grown accustomed to expressions like "information society", "mass media culture", and "media generation". Terms like these underline a remarkable fact: today, much that men and women know and think about life is conditioned by the media; to a considerable extent, human experience itself is an experience of media." (No.2). "As media become ever more intertwined with people's daily lives, they influence how people understand the meaning of life itself. Indeed the power of media extends to defining not only what people will think but even what they will think about. Reality, for many, is what the media recognise as real; what media do not acknowledge seems of little importance." (No.3). There is the real danger that people do not take their own 'direct' experiences as seriously as the 'secondary' media experiences. Modern mass media may be having a marked effect on religious faith, not just in terms of their handling of explicitly religious issues but, much more significantly, in terms of the influence which they exert on perceptions of social reality within which religious faith is understood and experienced. In our new media-forged symbolic environment God is not only apparently absent but functionally no longer necessary. The fact is that they no longer influence our culture they are becoming our culture.

Pope Benedict XVI did not create the controversy about Islam and violence but it was the media that created it. The media thrive on controversies. A speech given to a group of university students is quoted out of context by the media and the world begins to react without critical reasoning. It was not the Pope who finally made all the religious, cultural and intellectual statements, but the media. The media succeeded in making us look at the Pope in a particular way. This is what we mean by living in the mediated world. Issues and controversies are created by the media for their own profit. We should learn to become critical consumers of media and media products. We should use media and media should not use us. We should control media and media should not control us.

Part 2

Media as a socialising agent together with the family, school and religion

Today the electronic media or the electronically mediated cultural forms play an enlarged role in the formation of social, cultural identities. The media have a great role in shaping our personal identities. We can say that they have even overtaken the traditional institutions of socialisation: the family, school, and religion (and the peer group). Many would also say that electronically mediated cultural forms have the upper hand because they carry the authority of the society that, over the last half century has displaced patriarchal authority. For the discourse of social authority promises what family and friends cannot deliver: a qualitatively better life, consumption on an expanded scale, a chance to move beyond the limits of traditional working-class life. Though the school offers the promise of class mobility, the dreams are offered by TV serials, the celluloid dreams of the movies, and especially the advertisements, which evoke lifestyles, considered worth emulating. The relationship between education and media have in a certain sense become symbiotic. Many advertisements do not just sell products, but ideologies, capitalism and consumerism.

Images of violence, rape, infidelity in marriage and explicit sex are beamed directly into our homes. Flickering images of music videos (MTV), glamorous life styles and the new models and gurus of Fashion TV take people away from greater values. Articles in our newspapers and magazines speak of fashion shows and how "discos become legit and parents turn hep." According to many authors the greatest single catalyst of this mind-shift has been the satellite television explosion, which has made an entirely alien lifestyle a part of urban India's daily life. Satellite television has not only glamorised the lifestyle, but also validated it. MTV and Channel V (and other imitations) have not only changed young people's musical tastes but also their entire way of looking at life.

In this context Gerbner would say that because of the communications media, and television above all, modern society has moved away from the historic experience of mankind where children used to grow up in a home where parents (and religious heads) told most of the stories. Today television tells most of the stories to most of the people, most of the time. "Most waking hours, and often dreams, are filled with these stories. The stories do not come from their families, schools, churches, neighbourhoods, and often not even from their native countries, or from anyone with anything relevant to tell. They come from small groups of distant conglomerates with something to sell. The cultural environment in which we live becomes the by-product of marketing. Giant industries discharge their messages into the mainstream of common consciousness."

Other problems, like the effects of TV on children and young people who watch TV, two to four hours on an average daily, are ours now. In the US the average child sees 20,000 advertisements per year, 360,000 by age 18. He or she also sees 9000 scenes of suggested sexual intercourse on prime time TV each year and would have witnessed 11,000 televised murders by age 14. Excessive TV viewing is also one of the factors which cause aggression and exaggerated fear in children. There are other problems like children being left alone with the television; the use of the remote control to keep zapping from channel to channel in search of pure entertainment (and nothing "serious"). In Western countries people talk of the dangers of a new, secondary dependence, a secondary illiteracy. Children spend less time in playing and other creative activities and reading. Thus losing that sense of wonder and beauty so essential for humanity. Today there is the big problem of getting hooked to video games and getting addicted to violence in video games and the whole world of Internet. I just read about the father who was taking his son for a walk and they saw some poor boys playing marbles and the father explained this game of marbles to his son and his son asked him immediately whether the game was available as a video game.

Relationships and family lifestyles have changed, with people watching the TV even when having a game. In rich homes children are hooked to the Internet. Few people can narrate stories or spend time singing or playing together at home. There is less time for others - the need for constant entertainment takes up a lot of our time. Today the media are replacing the traditional agents of socialisation, like the family, school and religion.

When we speak about mass media and youth, the first thing we think of is media and the values or lesser values they propagate. One of the major concerns of mass media in society is its role as a teacher of values. Although rarely the mass media have the explicit purpose of teaching values, values are taught implicitly, and what we have to be concerned about are the slow, subtle changes in our opinions, values, images of people, culture and the world. As Sondhi says, the hypothesis is that the powerful media, which are getting not only more powerful but also pervasive day by day, are having an undesirable effect on our value system and culture. He uses the word "undesirable" because the process involves not only degeneration of the high quality of aesthetics in our tradition but also erosion of sanctity which the religious basis of these attitudes represent.

Mass media have gone commercial. Hence they are not really concerned about values. Love is often seen as sex, lust, passion, flirting, easy life, but other aspects of love like commitment, service, sacrifice and fidelity are not treated in a serious way. The experiences of romantic affection and attraction (falling in love) are capitalised upon. Infatuation is often shown as love (and not "being in love"). Sex and love are projected as interchangeable. Love and sex are commodities that one can put on and remove like the clothes we wear. Power could be portrayed as violence, often, senseless violence and opulence. They also showcase 'stars' - as dream images so different from their real life. This causes a lot of hero worship that is not healthy. The media set new trends, create lifestyles and changes the pattern and rhythm of life.

The media exercises great power in shaping contemporary culture, which is also becoming a global, dominant culture, largely defined by competitive individualism, consumer values and ethical relativism. Today we look at the media not just as one aspect of culture, rather, the media form, as it were the "web" of culture. They are our culture. They are seen as the matrix where most people now get most of their insight, influence, values and meaning. Today even religious faith is seen through the eyes of the media. Today people make positive use of the media and get enjoyment out of it. They have become an alternative source of religious information, sentiment, ethical guidance, moral values and community life. This often displaces the church from its public realm. Thus a major consequence is the reformation of moral structures, especially seen as moral relativism. The great amount and variety of information and opinions available through the media makes the development of durability and relevance in moral structure problematic. The constant flow of message through various media, good, bad, subtle, indifferent, entertaining, frightening, educating and informing to which everyone is exposed, makes it difficult for us to pick out the significant and discard the irrelevant. Often media construct these "truths" and people find it difficult to navigate through this labyrinth of information.

In the words of Ruth Goldsen and Gail West: "Human beings whose primal impressions come from a machine - it's the first time in history this has occurred. a cloud settles over the country from coast to coast, a cloud of visual and aural symbols creating the new kind of thought-environment in which Americans now live." "The ubiquitous box influences what we squirt, squeeze, smear. It has become the predominant inculcator of values. It has changed the long-standing institutions of government, religion and family."

                                                                                                       To be continued.
Fr. Joe Andrew sdb