We try to observe others and look for our role models. We generally try to imitate the behaviour of our role models. It is no doubt that TV has become an important part of the family along with the newspapers. TV speaks the most in any family. Our most of the leisure time is engaged with moving images of the TV or the news contents of the newspapers. We can have our ideals from other walks of life but it happens rarely. We imbibe most of the information through media, to the extent, that it is now shaping our behaviour, our opinions. Examples of 12 year old boy killing his friend in India or the similar incident in US have far reaching implications for the societal set-up in the coming days.
Media channels don’t operate in isolation. They are part and parcel of the society. They are, indeed, social institutions performing socializing functions but with implications. Media effect on behaviour has both aspects, positive and negative. And therefore we have tabs of every kind but still we have not come to the realization that we need an intense debate on these tabs. But that has to happen, sooner or later when social learning and media connect become complementary and not parasitic.
We can show the mutilated body parts of a powerful explosion again and again as was the case in Varanasi explosion and many other of the time but a CNN or some other US channel doesn’t go to beam dead bodies of Katrina on its soil. After that we have taken up things. We have started blurring images but still much has to be done. But that is just the beginning. It needs to be sustained and extended to the social base from here to culminate in a logical debate. But, then, that is the ideal and logical outcome. How can ideal and logic be followed in letter and spirit? The subjective objectivity will take its share too. We need to reach at a balance. Till then it will largely be parasitic connect with the perennial debate on ‘who is parasitic on whom’.
