Why Digital Media desperately needs Values and Virtue

 The use of digital media has become ever so rampant in the 21st century. From young children to the elderly, almost everyone owns or is linked to a digital device. Whether it be a smartphone, a television screen, a radio, a tablet, or a computer, everyone is seconds away from partaking in digital media. With its increasing popularity and becoming a necessity, digital media should positively influence consumers’ minds. It is no secret that digital media has harmful effects on individuals. But, there is a need for digital media to start moving to more value and virtue-centered content. This paper discusses the impact of digital media, specifically television shows, and how it is necessary to show and depict values and virtue.

The content team has decided to create their television series, Timmy, to teach and instill the necessary values and virtues to attain genuine happiness. The television series begins with a thirteen-year-old boy, Timmy, who travels to the future to talk to his future self. As young Timmy converses with his older self, he is told that despite all the wealth, fame, and power, that does not lead to genuine happiness. Older Timmy tells his younger self that the key to health and happiness is love and relationships. But, to achieve this, what is needed is values and virtue. With value and virtue, one realizes the beauty in everyday life, but more importantly, the beauty in love. It is through love where one becomes truly happy. That self-giving love allows a person to love another fully. Love full of value and virtue enables one to emphasize relationships. These three aspects of life work together; they are intertwined. Values and virtue are needed to find and foster self-giving love and maintain solid relationships. Knowing this, young Timmy travels back to his time, seeks to learn and develop values, strives to practice living by them continuously, and understands what it takes to love and build strong relationships. The television show will illustrate Timmy’s development, showcasing his journey into finding true happiness in his life. Timmy serves as an example to anyone, especially youth, of what it truly takes to become happy. The television show aims to be grounded by realism, showing all the difficulties and complexities of life. Simply put, the television show, named after its main character, Timmy, follows a young boy’s long road to finding happiness through values and virtue which inevitably fosters love.

As content creators of an original television series, it is essential to know that it can bring about harmful physical and mental effects, especially on the youth (Thomas, 2014). Firstly, excessive television watching can impact the brain development of children. According to Thomas (2014), and further asserted by Mythili, watching TV for two hours or more a day will affect children’s brain development. By impacting brain development, this leads to children possibly having behavioral problems in the future. Moreover, they found that prolonged TV viewing might lower cognitive abilities, reading and math skills, and language development (Thomas, 2014; Mythili, 2021). However, it is essential to note that Thomas and Mythili focus on excessive viewing. Mythili recommends not allowing children below pre-school to engage in television activity. Therefore, if parents strictly prohibit or limit television watching to a maximum of thirty minutes to an hour per day, it could potentially lessen such harmful effects on brain development. 

Also, television shows have the opportunity to be educational. These educational series can develop young children’s learning and social skills (Caron et al., 2009). The World Economic Forum agrees that educational series can help develop one’s literacy, interpersonal, and critical thinking skills (World Economic Forum, 2020). Examples of these education series include Sesame Street, The Magic School Bus, Dr. Seuss, Little Einsteins, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Television programs that can serve an older demographic are Jeopardy, Disney Earth or National Geographic Documentaries, Mythbusters, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Mythili (2021) says that only a few channels broadcast educational content covering subjects like art and craft, science, history, geography, and math. Thus, more television shows like Timmy are needed to be created and released to the public. Timmy properly educates the youth on where true happiness lies and how to arrive at that—showcasing the reality of life as a young boy, struggling to practice to live virtuously, and building solid relationships. It is clear that television shows can heavily influence brain development. But, by placing a limit on screen time and monitoring what TV series children watch, television shows can become a platform for education and the development of necessary life skills.

Another harmful effect is that television series have normalized the depiction of vices such as alcohol, drugs, and sex. According to Bar-on (2000), the average child annually sees about 14,000 sexual references, innuendos, jokes, together with substance instances. The use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs has become highly prevalent in television shows. Bar-on found that alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs are present in 70% of prime-time network dramatic programs and half of all music videos (Bar-on, 2000). This heavily influences children and teenage behavior, as they realize that it is normal to perform such acts. Most especially because the characters performing these acts do not suffer any consequences. Inevitably, teenagers’ sexual attitudes, values, and beliefs are tainted. According to Ponio (2021), children learn about right and wrong from TV shows and online videos. Those shows or videos are often inappropriate for their age, nor do they teach moral lessons. Ponio (2021) further states that a shortage of television shows catered to older teenagers that depict moral lessons. 

Two parties are involved in adequately shaping children’s acts, values, and beliefs – parents and the large media companies. It is up to these two parties to properly educate children about morals and values. To battle out the rampant depiction of alcohol, sex, and drugs, media companies should start creating content that revolves around virtue and morals. Virtues and moral values are vital in any stage of life as they allow one’s core to be full of kindness, humility, courage, and compassion (Ponio, 2021). Having a solid core will instill the necessary mindset to battle out harmful influences. Timmy intends to show a young boy’s struggle with building his morals. As stated above, the television show aims to be as realistic as possible to convince the audience to turn to value and virtue rather than harmful substances. Therefore, Timmy may still include a few comedic instances concerning alcohol to keep a more realistic tone. But, again, the show’s primary focus is still to teach children about building values that help them find true happiness. 

Moving on, another negative effect of television shows is addiction. According to Melinda Ratini (2021), addiction can be defined as excessive behavior or dependence on a substance or action/activity. Addicts tend to create habits for a couple of reasons, and it could be to feel relieved from tension, self-control, happiness, etc. Being addicted to TV is a behavioral addiction; therefore, it urges people to do something hard to control and stop. 

There are a couple of symptoms to show whether someone is addicted to TV or not. For example, tolerance means needing more action to get the same feeling. Suppose you stop spending time on important things and people in your life. You keep doing the action, even if it doesn’t make you feel good anymore (Ratini, 2021). Ultimately being addicted to watching TV shows is proven to be a real issue in our society. Due to TV addiction, issues that consistently come up include having a negative body outlook among women, lifestyle changes, sleeping problems, and heavy contributions to mental and physical disorders (Ratini, 2021). Additionally, television addiction can lessen a viewer’s physical activity. Children between the ages of 8-16 years old have a higher body mass index and body fat when watching 4-plus hours of TV per day (Ratini, 2021). 

The issues that arise due to television addiction are severe and detrimental to one’s health. Knowing this, the content creators aim to create a limited series (a television series only containing one season, usually consisting of eight to ten episodes) to lessen the chance of addiction. In addition, there are also positive effects to television exposure. Study shows that television shows may help turn college students away from alcohol and substance abuse. College students tend to fall into harmful substances; it can educate people about important topics, such as health and social relationships (Melinda Ratini, 2021). 

Lastly, television series can cause children to develop violent mindsets and behavior. One is bound to come across a violent movie or television series as they turn on their TV. According to Fitzpatrick (2018), 90% of movies and 60% of TV series have some form of violence in them. Moreover, younger consumers view extremely harsh and abrasive content. To be specifc, they view over 1,000 rapes, murders, robberies, and assaults sitting in front of the television set (Bar-on, 2000). These scenes are tremendously harmful to young children. They could develop perceptions and expectations about what they think the real world is like at a young age. Children exposed to scenes of violence may believe that the world is more dangerous than it is. This can cause children to have a more violent mindset and grow up to have an aggressive nature. 

With YouTube and Netflix, television shows have become very accessible nowadays; children are exposed with just a click of a button. As stated above, parents must limit their children from this easy access, mainly because there are many violent scenes on TV. They need to monitor and teach their kids that too much of something is wrong and that not everything you see on television is real. Aside from this, children are bound to learn how to balance their screen time and learn how to be more responsible and diligent. These virtues are essential to a person’s growth in character. Kids need to be mature enough to be exposed to movies and shows and understand that these scenes are all just for show. Timmy will not depict any violent scenes, therefore lessening the chances of viewers to attain such a damaging mindset and personality. Instead, Timmy will teach viewers how developing virtue can allow one to live to their fullest potential and importantly build strong relationships, consequently achieving the genuine happiness everyone seeks.

Digital media, more specifically television series, are highly impactful. Viewers are influenced and learn from what they watch; they use and apply what they see on TV in real life. As to everything, there are always positives and negatives. Television series are no exception. The adverse effects of watching television shows can be detrimental to one’s physical and mental health, most especially the developing minds of children. But, parents and TV companies make lessening and avoiding these effects possible. Placing restrictions on TV screen time, monitoring what one watches, and reducing the depiction of alcohol, drugs, sex, and violence can genuinely help battle television’s harmful effects. With that, the content creators believe that media platforms should start producing television shows that exhibit values and virtue. By creating Timmy, the creators’ objective is to teach viewers, focusing on the youth demographic, how to find true happiness in life by living and practicing virtue. Aside from this, the creators hope that Timmy will serve as an example for other production companies to start releasing their own content that shows and exemplifies virtue. Everyone is aware of the power of digital media, and it is only fitting that content creators nowadays influence the public positively.

Works Cited

Bar-on, M. E. (2000, October 1). The effects of television on Child health: Implications and recommendations. Archives of Disease in Childhood. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://adc.bmj.com/content/83/4/289. 

Caron, Andre et al. A National Study on Children’s Television Programming in Canada. Centre for Youth and Media Studies, Universite de Montreal, 2009.

Caroline Fitzpatrick Researcher at Concordia’s PERFORM center and Assistant Professor of Psychology. (2021, September 9). Watching violence on screens makes children more emotionally distressed. The Conversation. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/watching-violence-on-screens-makes-children-more-emotionally-distressed-106757.

Mythili, S. (2021, September 13). 12 good and bad effects of television on children. MomJunction. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://www.momjunction.com/articles/good-bad-effects-television-children_0074078/. 

Ponio, J. (2021, August 23). Why are moral values important in children? – our father’s House. Our Father’s House Soup Kitchen. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://ofhsoupkitchen.org/importance-moral-values-children. 

Ratini, M. (2021, June 17). What is TV addiction? addiction cycles, health problems, and more. WebMD. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/what-to-know-about-tv-addiction#2-7.

Sakellariouv, A. M. (2015, January 1). Virtue ethics and its potential as the leading moral theory. Inquiries Journal. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1385/virtue-ethics-and-moral-theory.

Thomas, L. (2014, June 16). Television has a negative influence on kids and should be limited. why.org. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://whyy.org/articles/television-has-a-negative-influence-on-kids-and-should-be-limited/:~:text=First,%20TV%20is%20a%20bad,more%20likely%20to%20be%20overweight.&text=This%20evidence%20shows%20that%20kids,can%20affect%20children’s%20brain%20development. 

Torre, N. U. (2015, December 6). TV shows impart good values, life lessons–for a change. INQUIRER.net. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from https://entertainment.inquirer.net/184955/tv-shows-impart-good-values-life-lessons-for-a-change

World Economic Forum. (n.d.). Benefits and opportunities. Digital Media and Society. Retrieved December 6, 2021, from http://reports.weforum.org/human-implications-of-digital-media-2016/benefits-and-opportunities/.