Mass Media plays a greater role than the people around you in the development of your personality

rebuttals for hypnosis arguments 1) Not actually needed anymore but i'm going to post here anyway so that the rebuttals line up. 2) On the contrary, I believe the causation to be very important. why you are doing something dictates how far you are willing to go with it. if you are being hypnotized on stage for a once in a life time opportunity or to quit a lifelong habit that's going to take years off of your lifespan then you're going to be much more willing to follow the suggestion of someone than if you were just looking for a time filler on the tv. finally, hypnotising yourself to change your personality can not be considered an argument for PRO unless you can offer some evidence that they would be doing this because mass media somehow suggested they do it and that mass media caused a greater effect in it than their peers or parents. Rebuttals for interpersonal relationship arguments 1) This argument does not offer any further evidence for the effect of media, it only agrees with my earlier point and furthers it to say that your peers take over personality development once your parents' effect starts to lessen. 2) Whilst a person may be influenced by the media that they watch, i would like to reiterate my earlier point that the media they partake in will often be recommended by their friends. to take this further you could then state that the media influenced the friend to recommend it but then this would quickly spiral into an argument indifferent to PRO or CON as you can't tell whether the initial point was a peer recommending the media or media influencing the peer, even if you could prove that the peer was influenced to tell his friend about the media. I further disagree with the analogy you use to describe this phenomena. the idea that a student will learn equally well from any medium is, to the best of our current knowledge, completely wrong. hence the development and classification of learning styles in schools to maximise information retention. http://www.eazhull.org.uk... Finally, whilst you can't often find what you want to watch on TV, very few people have serious difficulty finding groups of peers with which they can communicate and become engaged with. meaning that this effect of being more engaged would argue equally well for either side, and possibly more strongly for my arguements. rebuttals to further arguments 1) unfortunately, i am unable to open the link you posted due to restrictions on the school system. I would counter your argument however by saying again that we would therefore believe all that our peers showed and told us until we continuously believed it as well then. 2) I would argue that you do not know why the children wished to go to McDonalds but to think of it this way. If the commercial to your children to go to there but all of their friends told them repeatedly that it was nasty and unfilling, would they still want to go? or would they just agree with their friends to better fit in with the people around them. People are naturally social, this is shown repeatedly by the way groups of people will stand as one out of the way, almost as one entity, but very few will step forward and stand for what they believe in alone. in fact these people are so rare that they become famous for their efforts in many cases, I ask how many people were willing to sit back and accept apartheid until a small group of people stood up for their equallity. It is a shameful fact of humanity that we will sit back and allow wrong things to happen but i argue that a man on TV telling you that it's wrong will be no match for your friends and family telling you to keep your head down and get on with life in most cases. 3) whilst I can agree that peers tend to be full of fallacies, it doesn't take a genius to realise that so too is mass media. mass media is written and presented by people, who will hold the same fallacie as the people around you. In addition, you will often hang out with people with similar beliefs and interests to you. therefore similar fallacies to you, and as a result their existance will not result in you disregarding the beliefs of your peers.