Marketing Violence to Young People
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
Marketing Fear to Parents and Adults
As concerned adults, we also need to recognize when our anxieties about media violence are used to sell us on blanket censorship, ideology, and a variety of products.
Intellectual Property Ethics
Some of the most common ethical decisions youth face online revolve around intellectual property, but teaching kids to respect intellectual property can be particularly challenging because they may not see this as an ethical issue.
Plagiarism
Closely associated with intellectual property – but slightly different – is plagiarism.
Responding to Plagiarism
While youth actively participate in copying, with 95 percent of students in a 2017 survey admitting to participating in some sort of cheating,[i] they have trouble seeing their acts of plagiarism as having a victim. Ultimately, if nobody is hurt then we are unlikely to feel empathy and without that it’s hard to see something as being morally wrong.
The impact of stereotyping on young people
Generations of North American children have grown up watching “cowboys and Indians” films and TV shows and reading books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie. Popular films and novels reinforced the notion that Indigenous people existed only in the past—forever chasing buffalo or being chased by the cavalry. These images showed them as destined to remain on the margins of “real” society. Such impressions and childhood beliefs, set at an early age, are often the hardest to shake: as Anishinaabe writer Jesse Wente explains, “In the absence of appropriate representations of Indigenous Peoples in the media, misrepresentations become the accepted ‘truth.’”[1]
Indigenous expression in the arts and media
In the 19th century, Métis leader Louis Riel reportedly predicted: “My people will sleep for one hundred years. When they awaken, it will be the artists who give them back their spirit.” Most Indigenous groups in Canada have relied on the oral tradition to convey an idea, message or value.
The importance of media education
Media education can help young people put current images and messages about Indigenous people into perspective by helping them understand how the media work, why stereotyping exists, how decisions are made and why “it matters who makes it.” Media education is not about learning the right answers; it’s about consuming media images with an active, critical mind and asking the right questions.