Media Awareness

This series of articles will help educate you on the media's influence in society today, while presenting ways to combat this influence in your home. Think of it as a companion piece to our series on media discernment. In that series, you'll find out God's Word on discernment and how to make wise entertainment choices based on biblical principles. There you'll also find advice and insights on discussing media discernment with family and friends.

The Power of Media: Why Awareness Matters

Have you ever gotten a tune stuck in your head? All you need to hear are a few bars and it starts involuntarily buzzing around in there — for hours. It could be a commercial jingle or a Top-40 hit. Maybe you heard it in a shopping mall or a restaurant. We wander through a supermarket and find ourselves humming the last song we heard on the radio before getting out of the car. We carry a hymn from the morning worship service with us long into Sunday afternoon. We toss and turn in bed trying to expunge an uninvited television theme song.

Then there’s the visual media. Most of us can recall disturbing images we wish we could erase from our minds. Things we’ve seen in movies, in magazines, on TV. The point is that music and images tend to travel with us. Good or bad, they rarely go in one ear and out the other (figuratively speaking). And the downward trend of entertainment morality means that we’re carrying around images and lyrics that are increasingly destructive.

So, it’s hard to deny that music and visual images have tremendous sticking power. But do those lingering sensations really make a difference? The advertising industry believes they do. Why else would intelligent people who run large corporations plunk down $3 million for a mere 30 second commercial during the Super Bowl? They bank their business on your likeliness to recall and respond to their jingle, skit or montage.

Of course, the cause and effect process is not as simple as monkey see, monkey do. Rather, the media first affects our moods, attitudes and emotions, which then influence our actions. Plugged In spoke with Dr. Richard G. Pellegrino, an M.D., Ph.D. in neurology and neuroscience, about the effect that music has on our emotions. He’s been working with the brain for 25 years, and Dr. Pellegrino says that nothing he does can affect a person’s state of mind the way one simple song can.

Dr. Pellegrino has worked with opium overdose victims in a New York City emergency room. As overdosing patients struggled for breath, ER staff would work feverishly to prepare injections of Naloxone, a drug that binds the opium high. So what does this have to do with music? Plenty. According to Pellegrino, listening to music generates chemicals called endorphins in our brains — these natural opioids produce a high chemically similar to a drug-induced high. Experiments have shown that if you give Naloxone to a group of people and ask them to listen to their favorite music, it suddenly becomes an intellectual exercise — the intensity of the emotions seems to diminish.

This makes sense. We’ve all experienced the emotions that accompany music. That’s why we listen. The promise of emotional impact is why you’re more likely to hear the theme from Rocky than a Celine Dion ballad at a sporting event — the people in the sound booth want to create a mood, and they know that music is a powerful way to do it.

But getting this effect while dumping verbal garbage into your brain is much like getting high on opium — it may feel so great that you don’t want it to quit, but ultimately, you’re doing great damage to yourself. As Dr. Pellegrino told me, “You can pour messages in and if you pour the wrong messages in, they take on a particular power more than the listener understands.”

Whether its music, movies, television, video games or the Internet, it's important to be aware of the influence that these mediums can have on children and adults alike. We hope this series helps you in this endeavor so you can make wise entertainment choices for you and your family.

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