do stylistic analysis

What do you remember most about your childhood? Running through the long dewy grass of a meadow or the Saturday morning TV cartoons? Sitting in the kitchen watching your mother cook super or sitting in the livingroom watching Caprain Kangaroo!
Which came first on Sunday morning — breakfast or the comics?
Now bring your memories up to date. What did you and your friends talk about, at least part of the time, before class? An item from a newspaper? An ad that you noticed in a magazine or a television commercial? An episode from a popular TV series? A movie? Or a new record that you heard on the radio? If your answers parallel those of most young people, you add to the proof that mass media play a large and influential part in your life. Your answers also prove just how casually you accept the media, just as you accept the house you live in, cars, electricity, telephones, your school, and your family as part of your environment. Parents and teachers agree that all young people growing up with the media learn from them sometimes more than adults wish you to. (And this is the cause for alarm.) If the use of them referring to media in the last sentence seems strange, remember that the word media linguistically is plural. When people make a fuss about the media being a bad influence, they usual ly are talking about television, the most powerful medium of all. Maybe calling television the media can be justified technically because, as a medium, it embraces functions of several media such as newspapers, magazines, movies, and recordings. The major media can be divided into two kinds, print and elec tronic. The print media — newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets, catalogues, circulars, brochures, anything you read — are the old est, dating back to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The electronic media — radio, television, films of all kinds, records, tapes, anything that is transmitted by the use of elec tricity — are less than a hundred years old. Another meaning the word mass suggests is “the people”, a phrase
too often associated with adjectives like dullwitted, credulous, ill
informed, uncritical, and passive. Or are the mass of people wellin
formed, sophisticated, thoughtful, and active? Which are you? How
much of what you know about yourself has been taught you by the
media? You may not realize how greatly the media influence you be
cause in your lifetime they have always been there. In fact, short of
deliberate isolation on a mountain top or being lost in a forest and
reared by wolves, no one will ever again grow up without the pres
ence and influence of the mass media.
Is this good or bad?
An experiment recently conducted in Europe by the Society for
Rational Psychology showed that watching television is psychologi
cally addictive. The idea of becoming addicted to television brings
up questions involving subtle conditioning and brainwashing that
could be friendly or vicious, altruistic or selfserving.
In a commercial society the media’s ability to stimulate motiva
tion to buy — almost as though people were puppets on strings —
builds other people’s power. It can be power for good or power for
bad, but it is always power for control.
All these negative aspects of growing up with the media need con
sideration, at the same time you are enjoying the positive aspects of
immediately knowing what’s going on in the world, sharing great
entertainment and historical events with everyone else in our “glo
bal village”, and having the fun of trying out a new product that you
wouldn’t have known about without advertising.
According to a recent research report, more than a third of all chil
dren by the age of three are viewing TV with some regularity and
more than half are listening to books read to them. Before they are
old enough for school — a third of the children are looking through
magazines, 40 percent are listening to radio, and 80 percent are view
ing television. At age seven, newspapers enter a child’s life, usually
through the comic strips. You are one of these children. As you grew,
you absorbed uncritically, as children do.
And what did you absorb? Hundreds of items of information, most
of them accurate as far as they went. Increasing sophistication of taste
and appreciation of technical skills. High standards of performance
by talented musicians and actors that sometimes make your teachers
despair of competing effectively for your attention.
With all this, you also absorbed ideas about behaviour, about
right and wrong, good and bad, the permissible and the forbidden.
These ideas were presented to you — and still are — directly and
indirectly with the entertainment, advertising, and information. The
most powerful ideas are the ones you absorb indirectly. They are
digested emotionally at psychological depths that we still know lit
tle about, although we can tell that the effect of reaching those
depths is particularly strong and long lasting from behaviour pat
terns that emerge.
… Another indicating of media influence is in the language we use.
Whole new vocabularies come into existence with new inventions.
Look back at the first two paragraphs of this chapter. How many ex
pressions can you identify that came into popular usage with the de
velopment of a medium? How about TV cartoons? Or the abbreviat
ed version of the word television? In this country, we say TV and
spell it several different ways: tv, T.V., TV, teevee. In Britain, it’s the
telly, as everyone who watches the British “standup” comedian will
know. That term, standup comic, seems to be another media inven
tion. Actually, a comedian does sit sometimes, whenever the action of
a skit demands, but there is always that string of jokes, or wouldbe
jokes, delivered standing up, first at a stationary microphone during
early radio days, now just standing or wandering about a stage, mike
in hand. In advertising, the standup commercial was the first kind
used. In this, the announcer or star of the program would grasp the
product firmly in hand, making sure the name faced the camera, and
as persuasively as possible, recite or read the copy written about it at
an advertising agency.
Words introduced in the media frequently enlarge their meanings
far beyond the scope originally intended for them. How many mean
ings do the words Mickey Mouse have today? Which show approval?
Which disapproval?
The impact of the mass media is very strong. It changes our lan
guage, stimulates our emotions, informs our intellect, influences our
ideas, values, and attitudes. When you were young and absorbing
uncritically, you could not possibly know that the majority of the
material you saw and heard was designed to produce specific responses
from you. Some adults, for that matter, either do not know or refuse
to admit the following basic fact of media production: the MAJORI
TY of material is chosen or designed to produce a predetermined re
sponse. Even that part of media output called “entertainment” is cho
sen to keep you quiet, unquestioning, available, and receptive to
commercial messages inserted throughout. This is evident whether
the entertainment is a TV drama with commercials every few min
utes or a newspaper or magazine article with columns of type wrapped
around the advertisements.
The journalism, urgent issues, news, or informationgiving por
tion of media output is selected, edited, produced, placed in time slots
or positioned in the newspaper or magazine to reflect and support
the owner’s policies. However, no reporter, photographer, film or copy
editor, script or continuity writer in either print or electronic media
has ever needed to be told specifically what the boss’s policies are.
You pick them up through your pores within a week or two of accept
ing a job, and you work accordingly.
The owner’s policies, therefore, determine the response that the
media wish from you even if it’s only to keep quiet and accept. Then
the material is written, staged, photographed with or without audio,
printed and/or broadcast. We — counted in the millions, the mass
audience of mass media — are then programmed to buy, vote, con
tribute, believe, and support other people’s interests, interests which
may be commercial, political, charitable, philosophical, or educational.
Sometimes these interests will coincide with your own; sometimes
they won’t. Most of the time, the response comes in as programmed;
occasionally it doesn’t, or there is an additional, unexpected response.
Some of the media’s output has long lasting value and worth; some is
not only cheap, tawdry, and superficial stuff, but physically, emotionally, and intellectually harmful.