In the modern society the mass media has an enormous effect and therefore impact on various aspects of private and public life. The media (especially television) has become an important type of leisurely activity and entertainment in our lives. Television heroes stormed into our lives like new best friends. We talk about them all the time and we try to be and act more like them every passing minute. We are constantly surrounded with different media images and messages. Within one hour of television viewing, we can be faced with more “images” than a man in pre-industrial time has been all his life. The question lies in how to accept and manage all these “images”. We have to learn that what we see on television is not reality, it is just a
It is an easy way to gain money, fame and power.
REALITY SHOWS AND SOCIALIZATION
The question we need to ask ourselves is how this particular phenomenon affects us, especially young people and their self-esteem.
The television itself does not harm children nor teenagers - if they know how to critically look at the television programs and learn how to maintain their distance from the media and reality television.
Theorists like Parsons recognized that socialization didn’t stop when childhood ended. They realized that socialization continued in adulthood, but they treated it as a form of specialized education. The fact is that mass media has a big affect on the child’s secondary socialization as well. Secondary socialization is the process of learning how to behave in different groups (for example in school). It involves smaller changes within teenagers who become more aware of themselves and others. They start to make their own choices and comparisons of different experiences, and in my opinion reality television has a massive affect on them. Teenagers don not have their own way of thinking developed yet so reality shows dictate them what their goals should be, what to wear, which profession is “cool” and the perception that in life the most important thing is to be known and recognized.
A survey conducted in 1998 (Erjavec and Volcic, 1999: 126) shows us that more than half of the questioned children watch the television until