The Entertainment Industry's Effect on Children (continued)

Buy this book »

The teacher in Amanda’s kindergarten class was introducing the letter–sound relationship of “J.” When soliciting words children could recall, Mrs. Pineo got judge from Juan. So she asked if anyone knew what judge meant. Children responded, “it’s someone who would send you to jail if you did something wrong ... especially if you murdered someone, he’d be sure to send you to jail!” When asked how they knew this, the class as a whole replied, “It was on television!” That evening during dinner, Amanda announced to her family, “a judge would put you in jail if you did something really bad- like murder.” The give and take of the subsequent table conversation between Amanda and her parents provided further clarification on how Amanda was assimilating information from school, the media, and home.

One desirable outcome of our highly mediated world is that all people see and sense the diversity of individuals we have in modern American communities. As we view televised images of children playing in the streets of Guatemala, Canada, or Kazakhstan, we see them delighting in the same things that children in Seattle or Pittsburgh find desirable. Cultures across the world are borrowing steadily from each other and far more rapidly than previous generations. In American Skin (Wynter, 2002), a hopeful thesis on diversity is advanced for the transracial effect now found throughout the United States. Wynter makes a persuasive case for most Americans no longer reacting to racial and ethnic differences but adopting wholeheartedly the interesting and beneficial features of other cultural groups. This appears to be a positive departure from our society’s background of ethnocentrism.