Over the weekend, I read that romantic comedies are ruining relationships. People expect their relationships to be exactly like these movies, and they leave when it isn’t. For years, people have been either accusing cartoons and video games of increasing violent tendencies in children or studying the potential relationship between violence in children’s media and violent acts committed by children. I have to wonder how many of the love-scorned adults out there were children who learned their violent ways from cartoons and video games.
We teach young children about reality and fantasy. Somehow, if these studies are all to be believed, they lose that understanding somewhere in elementary school, and it only gets worse as they get older. I’d be willing to bet those (heavily-edited) reality shows don’t help much, either. I’ve known people who couldn’t miss an episode of their favorite reality show, and then couldn’t function if their own life wasn’t full of drama. While it was interesting to see what lengths they would go to just to add more drama to their life, I don’t really miss any of them.
The question here becomes: How do we keep reinforcing the difference between reality and fantasy? How do we make it strong enough that people can understand the difference between being inspired by media and expecting these stories to be how the real world functions? And how do we tuck the intentional moments of instruction in and have them sink in over everything else?
