Systems And Theories Essay, Research Paper

Many times we look to past decades in our lives or either in television series with a nostalgic outlook. Looking to the past with a nostalgia outlook is not always healthy for a person. When a person looks to another time in a nostalgic way people see things the way that things used to be and this can affect the outlook they have on society today. When a person has nostalgic outlook on life today they forget about a lot of aspects of life that was not around forty or fifty years ago, this can often produce counter productive results. Often when a person has a problem they look to the past for the answers of today.

When a person looks to the past they see how things use to be. Then one mass media has played an important role in nostalgia. If you look back to the 1930s like Coontzs does the major forms of mass media were not present during those years and were being better developed during the 1950s. When a person thinks of nostalgia they long for things to be the same way they were in the past decades yet they are not. The mass media can have a major effect on events such as gender roles, domestic violence, economic factor, etc. At the beginning of What We Really Miss About The 1950s Coontz makes a statement about her mother letting her check out whatever she wanted from the library, but she could not image doing this with her son today. This can show how the mass media has developed. Today there are just not books but there is also videotapes, CDs, and DVDs. This makes information more easy accessible than it was in the 1950s and the also a greater variety of resources to be viewed. This helps to make viewing of violence, sex, foul language more widely available for a younger audiences to view.

In some aspects of the new mass media has become a babysitter for young children after school. This can be seen as the younger generation looking to television series for a sense of nostalgia from the past. Young people see that past decades having little or none of the modern day stress of today society. With a high divorce rate today many children just want to be part of a family they may feel never will exists and so they put themselves in the television family to get a sense of what a real family is. As preteens they see shows and movies with people having sex and showing that it is pleasurable and that a new body bring joy and someone new to love in their lives. When teenagers get pregnant it could be as much the parents’ faults than the teens’ fault because they leave them home in front of the television to watch whatever is on and in some cases do not spend any quality time with their children, so the child or teenager reaches out for someone to care about and someone to love. As Murray suggest in The Coming White Underclass there are penalties that should be taken towards the teenagers but many of the penalties should be taken toward the parents.

Mass media has become a voice in society today for many of the haunting issues such as domestic violence is faced in our society. With the help of mass media the message has gotten to women that it is ok to leave the man that is assaulting them. On an economic standpoint the mass media has helped people know how to invest and spend their money even with the past fear of the crash of the stock market in the later 1930s.

Nostalgia has played an important role in society today. Nostalgia is not always healthy with for person. With the development of mass media over the last seventy decades there has been a lot of changes and insights that might have help a person see things in a better light but also has caused some longing for the way things use to be.