Message-ID: <19980527040010181.AAA74@joaquimm> Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 00:59:29 -0300 From: Joaquim Moura <mailto:joaquim.moura@PERSOCOM.COM.BR> Subject: Re: DEVEL-L Digest - 22 May 1998 to 25 May 1998 To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Dear Dr. Groebel (University of Utrecht, the Netherlands), Dear Devel-friends,I have read about the recent huge UNESCO's research, coordinated by Dr. Groebel, about Violence and TV, developed in 23 countries and surveying more than 5,000 youngsters. I strongly agree with your conclusions and I would like to add some comments about this dangerous relationship in Brazil.
1. This relationship was already appointed by many people, parents and teachers, but usually the midia doesn't agree with these concerns, and use to disregard them saying that there is no scientific evidence of the relationship between violence on TV and in our society.
2. Everytime someone states his/her concerns about the rampant violence in Brazilian society and commercial culture (TV, movies, music) he/she is appointed as someone who wants the return of the censorship state as we lived during the years of the military dictatorship in Brazil. But, indeed, nobody wants POLITICAL censorship back, but of course we need some kind of CULTURAL control to avoid violence and imbecilization increasing, as we are now facing, here and I suppose everywhere...
3. The violence doesn't come just from the violent movies and cartoons, but is also - sub-explicitly - in the soap operas, in the ads, in the music shows. Here I am talking about other kinds of violence that don't involve weapons, but a materialist point of view toward people and nature, a sexist way to present women to men that doesn't lead people to be kind to each other, etc., an individualist way to see the world, where each one just minds about his/her own small problems, disregarding community's and nature's problems, well being and future. If you see and listen to the way the speakers of football games narrate the playing, if you see and listen to our TV shows for children (every morning), you will notice that violence is not just the phisycal violence shown by American action movies and cartooms, but it can also come inside commercial entertainment, designed more to educate the tomorrow's consumers than fully developed people.
Another very important way that TV drives violence to increase is its very own way of reaching children's brain. Its typical format and resources, using violent colors, close ups, loud noises, abrupt cuts and sudden changes from scene to scene, all these stressing resources pertubate the delicate brain wiring process that is occurring during childhood. Little synthaxis, and a lot of salliencies, that is the way TV strives to get children's attention, and it is the way TV spoils our children's attention span and endurance, needed to read a book or to sustain a talking not so superficial as discussing football or sex and love affairs - the only things the youngsters are able to discuss now, here. Very differently from the youngsters of 30 years ago... (when every youngster had read many books before being reached by TV waves and contents... - very differently of the current 15 year-old adolescent, who have been imerged into TV since its babyhood).
Analyzing the whole scene, I wonder how most people may believe in true development, or in a better future, if we allow that the next generations be downgraded by commercial TV. Your research was published just by a newspaper in Brasilia. I suppose you have received a copy of it. Have you? Do you know about its followup among the educators, the politicians, the scholars, the economists, the development experts, the media publishers,executives and tycoons, around the world? I would like very much to join a forum that discusses this matter and acts accordingly... I have limited this comments to TV, but of course there are other important reasons to make violence among youngsters keeps exploding...
Tomorrow I will answer Lars Thomsen <mailto:lars.thomsen@REPORTERS.NET> about what football means to Brazilian population, and then let him conclude if it is positive or negative, for human full development, to lead people to dedicate so much emotion, so much attention, so much dedication, to a sport, and ignore the huge problems that keep them far away from what they deserve for being humans...
Thanks, yours, Joaquim