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Mass Media And Adolescence: How Mass Media Influence Teens In Their Sexual Behavior

Mass media plays a paramount role in today’s society, as it showers over increasing numbers of people all around the world. Used to communicate news and events on a daily basis, mass media is defined as those media that are designed to be consumed by large audiences through the agencies of technology. Mass media caters to a diverse audience, ranging from children, to adolescents, to adults. Amongst said audiences, “Adolescents are vigorous users of the information broadcasted in media” (Werner-Wilson, Morrissey & Fitzharris, 2004).
G Stanley Hall, a renowned American psychologist believed that the stages of adolescence reflected a stage in the human evolutionary past when there was a great deal of upheaval and disorder- with the result that adolescents experience a great deal of “storm and stress” as a standard part of their development. According to Hall the time of storm and stress is reflected through 2 types of difficulties: conflict with parents, and risk behaviors. Conflict with parents can be explained by the fact that as a child grows into an adolescent, he develops an autonomous behavior leading to the want of being independent. As a result of this, adolescents approach different sources of information such as the media. “Depending on their rate of development, some adolescents may succumb to media influences, while other may not.” (Werner-Wilson, Morrissey & Fitzharris, 2004). Adolescents seem to be a predominant target by the media as they are constantly exposed to it and constantly seeking information from it.
Ever since the discovery of AIDS in the early 1980s, it became important to educate the population about the protection against sexually transmitted diseases. From that time one, sex became less taboo, hence allowing the media to expose the subject publicly and without restrains. According to Hawk, Vanersenbeeck, de Graaf and Bakker (2006), the more often adolescents are exposed to media, the earlier they are prone to become sexually active....