Media - How it’s Affecting Children Today

By: Gio Liban & Cindy Nguyen

WOMS5Q- Section One

Cindy- The purpose of this photo-portfolio is just as the

title implies, we wanted to capture how children

are influenced by the various forms of media.

Why media and children? Well besides

the fact that we have been talking about the

media this whole semester, our reason is pretty

simple, it’s because we have seen the effects of

media on children ourselves.

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And by children, we’re talking about ages 3-10.

Children spend more than half their day, at least

10 hours, in front of the media and my sister

and his cousins fall in this category. Gio’s cousins are

always found glued to some type of electronic

screen, they have become dependent on

technology as if it was a necessity.

My sister often questions her body about why she

does not look similarly to the girls on the magazines.She always asks if she looks chubby in this or

that and she’s only 10. Sometimes she would

even starve herself even though she’s hungry. She

says the chubby kid always gets picked-on on TV

shows and she doesn’t want that to happen to her.

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With that said, the objective of the photo portfolio is

to make apparent the effects of media

and in hopes of making others aware of it. How

so? Well, through frozen still time, pictures.

We chose this method of informing because

we feel that pictures helps you the audience

visualize and understand the message that we’re

trying to convey better. And also we wanted to

be original in going about this project. Instead of

the usual power-points and videos, photography

puts a twist in that normality.

Gio- Lastly, I will talk about the particular style used and why. First about the styles incorporated. In doing this project, we chose to use two in the array of methods in capturing photos: candid, or the subject is not aware that they are being taken a photo off, and studio, meaning the subject posed for the photo.

Why these two? Candid captures the interaction between the media and children or the effects of media on children in essence. And such is apparent in the photo with my cousin’s dog, Boots is his name, staring at her. This shows how media is affecting children’s responsibilities and surroundings such as ignoring the dog to play with the ipad. And the photo of my other cousin, Enzo, reaching for the iPhone shows how this dependency on media starts at a young age.

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As for studio, this method puts further emphasis on what we’re trying to convey, in this case how media is influencing children, by making our theme quite obvious. This is clear on the picture with Cindy’s sister being surrounded bymagazines. As you can see when she is reading the magazine she has a face of discomfort and is most likely wondering why she does not look the picture on the magazines. And the various magazine sprawled on the floor represents how much it influences her. The other picture of the various mediums of media laid out on the floor shows how these medias that influence children have become everyday items.

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