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Printer-Friendly ModeUnrealistic worries stem from media influences
October 5, 2009 —
In the last 20 years, studies have focused on how television has affected the viewer’s perception of their real environment. The American society is heavily coated with media of all types that can affect the perception we have of reality.
The TV studies show how media manipulation changes the way we see death because people on TV die in tragic or exciting ways. We tend to view TV shows and feel nervousness for certain situations that may not need it. You might see people chain smoking before getting onto an airplane because of their nervousness of the chance that the plane will wreck, but they are actually more likely to die from constant smoking rather than the odds of the plane crashing. Someone who uses a cell phone while driving is four times more likely to get into a wreck than someone who pays attention to the road. Usually, people are more fearful of trips on an aircraft rather than of fiddling with their phone while driving, or smoking a carton of cigarettes a day, even though an aircraft-related death is less probable. These false assumptions are created by what we see in the media.
The media shows deaths in tragic or graphic ways, an example being the story lines from the Final Destination series. It shows a string of less likely, yet tragic deaths and scares the viewers in the meantime. After watching the second Final Destination (2003), being 13, I became worried about things like a pipe falling off a truck and flying through the back of my car. This is exactly my point: we see the calamity that TV shows and movies create and become more afraid of doubtful mishaps than the reality.
The media can bring similar concerns to adults. We see people die on TV regularly, whether it is on fictional shows or in documentaries, and it brings worries to our subconscious minds. This gives us the nervousness for the places we see the deaths occur, such hospitals, airports or even walking the streets alone at night. Some may say they acknowledge that TV and movies aren’t real, yet statistics still say most are frightened by the more tragic and less probable occurrences. The American Worker’s Safety Survey showed in 2006 that most people feel safer at home than at work, yet the opposite is true. So, we are often afraid of the possibilities of the different ways we can die, even when the odds show the opposing situation being more likely.
I cannot say that we are all fully fearful of the odds of our demise within a certain situation from the media, but we still see the worries that match what we observe in it from time to time.
Consistently, most people are affected by the tragic scenes we often see on TV rather than the less tragic, yet realistic dangers we put ourselves in every day.