"Monkey see, monkey do- has become a well-known saying in today's modern, media-warped society, but is it correct? What has the world come to these days? It often seems like that everywhere one looks, violence rears its ugly head. We see it in the streets, back alleys, school, and even at home. The last of these, our homes, is a major source of violence. In many living rooms, there sits an outlet for violence that often goes unnoticed. It is the television. The people who view it are often pulled into its realistic world of violent scenes with sometimes devastating results.
Much research has gone into showing why our society is so mesmerized by this glowing box and the action that takes place within it. Only a mere sixty years ago the invention of the television was viewed as a technological breakthrough with black and white ghost-like figures on the screen so small, hardly anyone could see them. Today that curiosity has become a constant companion to 90% of the American population (Sherrow 26), mainly, children and teenagers. Unfortunately, it is these violent programs that are endangering our present-day society. Violent images on television, as well as in the movies, have inspired people to set spouses on fire in their beds, lie down in the middle of highways, extort money by placing bombs in airplanes, rape, steal, murder, and commit numerous other shootings and assaults. (Brown 78).
Most of what is broadcast or transmitted, even in the news, today is with reference to the chaotic condition of our planet. The more atrocious the event, the more publicity it receives. "The average American child will witness 200,000 acts of media violence by the time that child graduates from high school."" (Sherrow 6) "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders,"" James Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows my Name. "But they have never failed to imitate them."" (Sherrow 56) This basic truth has all but disappeared as the public increasingly treats teenagers as a robot-like population under sway of an exploitative media.