Am I Making My Decisions?

In my studies of media literacy I have come across several defined factors that affect and influence people interacting with various media types. Developmental maturities, cognitive abilities, knowledge structures and media exposure habits are just a few of the 13 factors detailed in the book Media Literacy by W. James Potter that I have been reading. An interesting activity midway through the text interested me and I thought it deserved more attention. It is an exercise titled "Profiling the Probability of an Effect" and essentially required me to analyze a particular media effect along with its pattern of factors that would influence the probability of the effect actually occurring.

I think I am a fairly typical male, by this I mean most of my interactions with media involve sports and some shows on the Discovery channel and History channel and of course Family Guy. I concentrated my self-analysis on my television viewing, the amount of and type of shows that I gravitate towards. Sadly, much of what I view yields no educational benefit. Advantages to not watching much that would be considered worthwhile programming is that it is seen as such and therefore carries less weight leading to less risk of conditioning me in certain negative ways. This can be viewed conversely but since I am aware of how trivial the shows I watch are, I feel I do not fall into the category of the "manipulated."

One of the most important factors dealing with risk point factors and where each individual sets on this line dealt with the individuals lifestyle. "People who have active lifestyles where they interact with many people and institutions are generally less affected by media"(Potter). Applying this to me I felt this to be true. Thinking about I realized that the more and varied input a person receives the less susceptible that person is to being influenced unduly.

I looked up some studies done by researchers that connected aggressive behavior of adults to them having watched three or more hours of television per day in childhood. "Adolescents who watch more than three hours of TV daily are more likely to engage in aggressive behavior as adults, a new study says"(CNN). Studies like this, even when done by such a prestigious source, yield bogus results to me. Any moron can figure out that if you just set a kid down in front of a television for the better half of their childhood that they are not going to turn out to hot. The "varied"(haha as mentioned above) sources that I perused all led me to believe that; Yes, indeed I am making my own decisions.