Values and information

First of all, we shall mention some of the benefits of visual media as being the most prominent media types:

• It combines cultivation, education, and entertainment.

• It addresses the senses of hearing and sight.

• It has the ability to satisfy the humanitarian needs of childhood.

• It has the ability to develop child's imagination and feeding its capabilities.

Of its negative effects:

• It affects faith through the manipulation of some media stations with Muslims' beliefs and defamation of its basis and disciplines.

• It affects manners by the deployment of vice and corruption.

• It affects economic consumption through advertising campaigns.

• It affects the physical and mental health.

Forms/ patterns of media influence:

• Changing (knowledge and intellectual) attitudes and trends.

• Social and educational rearing.

• Collective and emotional agitation.

• Social control.

• Formulation of reality and dedication.

Role models in the age of TV:

Family and school are no longer the source of the role example, but family and school underwent to another soft authority, charming, exciting, luxurious, attractive, able to influence, breaks in houses by force, affects children, cultivates the grown up people, but has not behaved them well; it is the power of media[1] (visual - audio - readable) embodied in TV and the Web. So, the media has become a parallel school, but dominant.

School used to contribute largely in social rearing for individuals and in providing them of knowledge and ethical and social values but the spread of mass media, especially TV, has weakened the status of school which is no longer the main source for knowledge and ethical and social values. In a country like Morocco, the difference amount between airplay and the hours of teaching in school is one to three; i.e., the hours of TV airplay is threefold the hours of teaching that schools do.[2]

Television according to "De lou" is a parallel school and a unification factor for the rising generations. In this parallel school (i.e., TV), the father is no longer the role example for a child but series' heroes are.

The biggest part of children's wishes are satisfied by ads and television series.[3]

Psychologists and education experts advise that a child is encouraged to speak out and comment on TV programs. So, it should comment on everything it sees and listens to, and express its emotions of events. It should criticize, think, and analyze, assisted and activated by its parents or a family member, thus reduces the impact of TV.

I may go further to tell the parents not to leave their children lost in the dangerous mazes of TV programs and channels, so as not to lose their beloved children. I ask them to take them step by step until they grow up, be independent, and become able to differentiate between good and bad. The family should teach the standards by which they may know right from wrong!

I do not see that a child should be left alone in front of TV because the remote control is in its hands and it may watch appropriate or inappropriate programs, and as soon as its parents enter the room, it changes the channel as if nothing happened.

"The American Psychological Association says when an American child reaches the end of primary school, it has seen 8,000 cases of assassination and 10,000 violent assaults on TV with an average of 3 hours per day. If violence releases a certain threshold, it leads to the accumulation of non-absorbed excitement; leading to violent behavior."[4]

Does media contribute to the development of fine values?

• Media is one of the most important sources of social rearing, human, economic, and environmental development. It is a means of advancement and prosperity in the value sense.

We can identify three types of media:

• Useful media

• Harmful media

• Hypocrite media

• The effects of media are great and reality is a clear evidence to that.

• Multi-media channels and their different beliefs and ideologies make it difficult to control values.

• We must unify the visions on the subject of values in order that the different media channels abide by, it is wrong that the media contributes to the destruction of fine values; and surely it has demolished and destroyed.

• I cannot imagine the existence of a neutral media. All types of media bore backgrounds, ideologies, and philosophies that direct the media scene, events, and situations.

Who bears the responsibility if values are spoiled?

• The media bears the responsibility (media policy) from one hand because of its important status in the processes of social rearing.

• It does not bear the responsibility alone because it does not affect except if a person has the ability to be affected by such as when the family neglects its educational duties.

"There is a consensus among those who have studied the phenomena of cultural invasion in different countries that experienced it on one reality which is: The cultural invasion, leakage of Westernization, or success of cultural modulation depends in some degrees on the ability of receiving it. Modulation is a process that is imposed from outside which cannot succeed except if there are internal conditions, exactly as the case of military invasion or economic dependency. These conditions are summed up in the weakness of cultural immunity, no matter the differences of its causes and forms."[5]

Cultural famine: When the local culture does not meet the need of youth, children, and people in general, they resort to foreign cultures. The case of famine which they suffer motivate them to take their culture voraciously, and in turn they affect the rising generation under their custody.[6]

If the local culture is strong with beautiful and fine values, good manners, fundamentals, and strong pillars which is able to face the invasive and exotic foreign cultures, Arab people would not have resorted to foreign culture. Therefore, we bear full responsibility to our shortcomings and negligence.

The media is of great effect in the following cases:

• When it repeats its message and make it a habit.

• At the presence of a family vacuum.

• Through the role example: The presented models such as elites.

• Are you the one who entered the screen to his house?

• Are you among those who use the web?

• Are you the one who allowed his children to watch and participation?

If you are, you bear the responsibility and you should not complain.