Family Life Education Series
"Our Teenage Children in the 21st Century"
Teenage Youth and Mass Media

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Our previous topic on "Violence on School Ground" shed light on our concern over the depth and intensity of the problem. Another "hot" issue of family violence has struck society as a whole when a homicide and suicide took place in Tin Shiu Wai. Dr Howard Cheng, Associate Professor of Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, picks this incident for discussing the influence of the mass media and reminds parents to teach their children to be "media literate". The following is a summary of his translated article.

What role should the media play? Of course, they have to report what has happened, but what about their viewpoints? How do they set a standard of evaluating the validity of their stand? As you can see, certain mass media appear to have more credibility than others in that respect. How do they keep their objectivity or should they? What should we base ourselves in order to maintain our own objectivity?

Our teen/youth culture is deeply affected by the developments of the mass media, both positively and negatively. They seem to "fit and feed" each other's needs in the commercial and industrial world. Teens and youth developments can be separated into three aspects: biological, psychological, and philosophical developments of values and beliefs, which are affected by the mass media.

Certain developments deserve societal attention of the impact on the teen/youth population, namely (a) popularity of ICQ and internet; (b) popularity of intrusive news of movie and sports stars and characters; (c) worship of mass media as reality; (d) lack of communication among adults; and (e) commercial value of these intrusive and dominating media.

There is no doubt that the mass media affect everyone's daily life, with teenagers/youth population more vulnerable because of their nature and development. Are we as adults completely immune to that? We may not completely believe everything the media say.

Maybe, we should develop our "media literacy" by developing our own independent thinking and help our children develop that also.

- from PS & SR Branch Welfare Services Group -