Public Policy and the Media

Abstract

This paper will consider the impact of communications technologies on global peace and non violence by examining how these technologies are addressed in public policy on culture, education, health and safety. Discussion will focus on how they are employed in advertising industries to target children; ways in which special effects in the production of films, television programs, video and computer games fuel the use of violence as a form of entertainment and how this is resulting in increasing evidence of collective desensitization in communities and schools throughout North America.Manifestation of these trends is at odds with educational goals that discourage the use of violence as a form of conflict resolution, materialistic, consumer driven value systems, and unhealthy eating habits. It will be demonstrated that unimpeded proliferation of popular culture as entertainment for profit driven purposes, laced with themes of sex and violence because they sell well on a global market and translate easily into any language, will have to change, if we are to encourage transformation and sustainable development on either a local, national or global basis.Massive export of popular culture commodities by the U.S., long the world's leader in this context, has more than quadrupled in the past two decades with content increasingly coarse and violent. This is having an international as well as local and national impact. The ingrained belief that what is good for show business is good for America's image is not only gravely eroding the country's reputation around the world, but accelerating a culture of violence that is, from an educational, health and environmental perspective, at odds with efforts for a paradigm shift that will move us forward, as a species, towards social justice and a green Earth.