Paper Presented at CPDHE Refresher Course in Psychology
The impact of viewing television, motionpictures and internet is one of the newer area that has drawn the attention of policy-makers, sociologists, psychologists and even the common man of our society. Underlying psychological principles of learning, motivation, perception, values, ethics and group processes are experiencing spontaneous changes with a pace that has not happened in the past. Media as an industry has a different perspective and priority and academic researchers are hardly aware of the agenda setting objective of media. Social cognition theory suggests that repetitive and redundant portrayals of trivialized social reality does leads to new intrapersonal and interpersonal topics of importance. Desensitization accounts for people who are heavily exposed antisocial acts and become less conscious about the consequences. Drawing upon the concepts of cognitive new associationism, priming effect analysis suggests that elements of thought or feeling or memories are parts of a network connected by associative pathways. Thus for some time after a concept is activated there is an increased probability that it and other associated parts of the network will come to mind again thus creating the priming effect. There are many antecedent variables such as media structure, media technology, social circumstances, psychological variables, needs, values and beliefs that all related to gratification pattern of the audience. Media content can spin social reality in terms of your eating behaviors, educational preferences, dress, recreational preferences by cultivating of perceptions of new social reality. Reality shows, different T.V. serials highlight the selective aspect and focus it to be the topics of reality. Learning from media environment results in perception of real social environment. T.V. viewing of programmes of paranormal activities such as palm-reading, vastu, previous life experiences, astrology, tele-kinesis does help in creating a belief in paranormal experiences. Valentine day celebrations, new year parties, excessive use of internet chatting, frequent SMS messaging for any trivial communication and message exchanges an each festivities such as Diwali, Dusshehra, Raksha-bandhan, Independence day, Republic day, Father’s Day, Daughter’s day, are slowly and gradually becoming a ritual part of our behavior. A new pattern of cognitive framing is taking place consciously and unconsciously among heavy viewers and heavy users and consuming much of their time. The generation gap is also increasing in disproportionate manner because of cultivation of a new social reality. It will erroneous to assign the same degree of impact without taking into consideration the demographic and cultural context variables. Psychological dependence on internet causes person’s to onlineaholics who ignore family, work and friends as they devote most of the time to surfing net.
Through this paper an attempt will be made to understand various psycho-social and cultural variables affecting prosocial aspect of behavior-affilation, well-being and antisocial and unsocial aspect of behavior. Of being violent, selfish lack to concern with family and society.
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