In mid-March, my friend and I sat in the front row of a minor league ballpark in Tucson, Arizona, watching a spring training game between the Diamondbacks and the Rockies. A woman in her early twenties sat next to us. She asked my friend if he liked her shoes, a pair of bright orange suede Adidas with nifty white stripes. He told her they were all right. Even though he affirmed her, she replied, "I know, but at least my socks are Nike."
By age 18 the average child in America has seen 100,000 commercials on TV. Counting logos, signs, promotions, and all the other mass mediums, this figure soars to nearly twenty million. Behind each ad exposure is a simple message that every child internalizes - you're a loser because you don't own this. No advertising tells us we're okay and don't need to buy anything. Advertising tells us we're uncool, missing what's in style, too fat, too bored, or too boring.
Although our political leaders choose to ignore it, over 4,000 scholarly studies have found that mass media causes societal violence. The Surgeon General wrote in 1972, that "the debate is over." Recent research has found that higher amounts of television viewing is correlated with underage drinking. Teens that see R-rated movies are three times more likely to drink and smoke. And despite all the blame that alcohol and tobacco companies put on parents they depict as not doing enough in their so-called prevention spots, advertising influences children to smoke twice as much as does peer pressure. The same holds true with alcohol. Grube & Wallach (1994) found that children who are more aware of beer advertisements have more favorable attitudes toward drinking, and are more likely to report an intention to drink beer once they are adults.
Media literacy is a powerful tool to inoculate youth against the destructive values being sold to them. The National Office on Drug Control Policy (June 2001) reported that "because the(ir) Campaign's entire strategy acknowledges the power and influence of media on America's youth, it is important and appropriate for the initiative to help young people develop their critical thinking skills by further investing in media literacy."
Media literacy is the ability to "read" television and mass media. Media literacy education teaches people to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media. Children who understand the motivations and production techniques of media are less likely to adopt the unhealthy attitudes or behaviors that mass media depict.
What makes media literacy a powerful prevention tool is that it takes children's natural tendency to rebel, and redirects it towards those selling them addictive lifestyles. Media education represents a new and exciting approach to protecting youth from the unhealthy effects of media -- an approach that is not dependent on Hollywood's or Madison Avenue's willingness to accept responsibility for its programming and advertising.
In conversations with some of the 50,000 students I give presentations to each year, I continually hear about the impact media literacy education can have. I've had young girls break into tears after seeing me show how actresses and models are computer enhanced in such ridiculously fake ways. I've gotten letters from ex-smokers expressing their gratitude for saving their lives by showing how tobacco ads can manipulate teens into addiction. The impact of media literacy on prevention is more than anecdotal. Post-tests from tobacco prevention talks I gave show that a third of teen smokers attending make an immediate attempt to quit their habit.
At the 2000 Alcohol Policy XII Conference, I presented the results of a study that found a single 45-minute presentation deconstructing alcohol advertising led to significant changes in the social expectancies middle school students had about drinking. Several peer reviewed studies have been published that found similar results with children as young as the third grade. While at Washington State University, Erica Austin (1997) published two studies showing a change in children's intention to drink alcohol after a media education program. Participating students were less likely to rate alcohol ads positively, were less attracted to alcohol promotional material, and showed greater disdain for alcohol commercials
As with alcohol prevention, researchers are beginning to find that media literacy is an effective tool in helping prevent and treat eating disorders. Stormer & Thompson (1995) found that very brief instruction in media literacy given to women in college produced significant pre-to-post program reductions in appearance- and weight-related anxiety. The students were less likely to idealize the slenderness embodied by fashion models and actresses. Irving, DuPen, & Berel (1998) found that high school girls viewing a media literacy film on body image and discussing it reported less internalization of a "thin" beauty standard and lower perceived realism of media images than did their comparison group.
Media literacy education can also reduce children's susceptibility to violence. A study conducted with English 8- and 9-year-olds demonstrated changes in children's comprehension and awareness of media violence. In 1983, Huesmann, et al., found statistically significant changes in children's attitudes about media violence using media literacy. Their treatment simply consisted of two training sessions within a 2-week period where third graders wrote essays for a video about how harmful television violence can be.
Parents and teachers can take back control of the values being taught to our children. It doesn't take a lot of effort either to teach a child to be media literate. One study found that parents who talk back to their TV sets had children who were less likely to drink in their teens. The American Academy of Pediatrics has a wonderful website with tips for teachers and parents called Media Matters.
The beauty of teaching media literacy for prevention is that students love learning about media. Schools also embrace media literacy because, ultimately, students are being taught critical thinking skills. And if these are not reasons enough, the preventive value of media literacy is not substance or behavior specific. The media literacy skills used to deconstruct and build resistance to tobacco advertising are the same ones used to prevent underage drinking, violence, eating disorders and other risky behaviors. I encourage you to become a cultural revolutionary and begin to learn and promote media literacy.
