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When the Real Thing Just Isn't Good Enough

From Now On The Educational Technology Journal When the Real Thing Just Isn’t Good Enough by Jamie McKenzie http://www.fno.org/apr05/whenreal.html The following article “When the Real Thing Just Isn’t Good Enough” discusses how media no longer focuses on the “REAL” news, and replaces reality with Hollywood fantasies and reality television. The author states that society as a whole is being blinded from reality and the real issues that Americans face by what our government wants us to see. The author believes politicians and network owners want America to feel as if we are safe and living a dream. They feed Americans what they “think” we want, rather than the actual facts. The author states that if media continues to report “lightly” on the major issues and “heavily” on the entertainment issues, children of generations to come will eventually lose sight of real history and world awareness. The author pushes the urgency for Americans to wake up and realize that their children are unaware of the actual events that are happening in their communities, state, country, and world around them. Children are being persuaded via media towards pro-war, pro-bush beliefs because they are not being introduced to the harshness of war considering it might be too frightening, disturbing, irritating, (or illuminating). The author feels as if the “powers that be” are rewriting history so young ones will learn only those aspects of the past that are pleasing to them. He feels as if our media and technology is being too filtered for our youth when it comes to news and major issues, but yet we don’t filter enough when it comes to the perverse, destructive, or fantasy media that our youth is now internalizing as “Real Life”. This article stirred many strong beliefs and feelings I have concerning politics and the way our country is being “run”. I wholeheartedly agree with the author in that our youth is unaware of reality. I believe that children of today are overexposed to media in general, whether it is reality television, playstation, computers, or cell phones. The media they view on television is giving them a false sense of reality. I just heard a statistic the other day that the average student will receive eight hours of media a day, however as we all know, this is probably not the educational media that we hope our children would be absorbing. I would hope that even though media does not show our children the harsh reality of our world, parents are educated enough to pass information on to their child. The author went as far as to say that even adults are blinded by what we know and read in the papers because of “who” runs the papers and what political group they are supporting. I don’t know if I feel that there is a “conspiracy” or “big brother” watching at all times, however I do agree that networks and publishers can be bias at times. The only part of the article that I did not somewhat agree with was how the author never came up with a solution to this problem. He had a legitimate argument that our children are in desperate need of true facts and history, but never came up with a possible solution. I feel that that whatever the solution could be, it needs to be a good medium of actual facts and events along with some censorship. We don’t want to scare our children from playing in their own front yard or throw so much harsh reality at them that they eventually become desensitized to the crime, war, and destruction around them. However we shouldn’t pull the wool over their eyes either and replace it with a dream world of millionaires, fancy cars, and other luxuries that reality television portrays as “real life”.

Great review - very thought provking. I believe the issue with technology and the students of today is not that we need to teach them the skills in suing technololgy, but instead the skills in being discerning consumers of technololgy.
+80
cstafford

September 3, 2006, 12:00 am [ report as inappropriate ]

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