Television, childhood and early adolescence

Abstract

The twentieth century may easily go down in history as the century which saw the greatest development in mass communications, either by newspaper, radio or television. Few would, however, dispute the fact that of all the means of communication available to modern man, television is the most popular in any culture and with people of all age groups. It has probably brought greater changes in modern life than anything else since World War Two. It has brought not only the miracle of live news coverage, but endless advertising in every home. Cinema and radio have faced dwindling audiences and many newspapers have been forced out of business. My aim in this study is to examine some aspects of the different and very often controversial effects that the small screen can have on young viewers. For, as A.P. Higgins put it in his book, Talking about Television, 1.An average child spends as long in front of a television set as he does in front of a teacher. He spends about twenty hours a week viewing, during holidays as well as term time. For many children, this is longer than is spent in contact with all other forms of communication - reading, listening to music, going to the cinema, theatre, art gallery. Naturally, endless volumes can be written on the different relationships and mutual effects between television and the modern man. I have therefore, selected three distinct topics namely, what has made television so popular during the last twenty years, how children look at television personalities and the controversial issue of televised violence. In the last part of this work, I then tried to point out some aspects of television broadcasting in Malta and children.