Violent Television/Internet Commercials: Behavioral Effects on the Minds/Emotions of American Youth

I was recently pondering the effect that television and Internet commercials have on the day-to-day behavior of human beings, especially of those millions of impressionable adolescent and preadolescent American boys and girls, primarily between 5 and 19 years of age. Much like computer video games, which are designed to get the person, or persons, playing the games (80 percent of Americans who regularly play video games are between the ages of five and nineteen) cognitively and emotionally detached from their real environmental surroundings and immersed into the games’ virtual (fantasy) environments, commercials are usually three-to-five minutes in length and carefully designed by television, computer, advertising, and social psychology experts to get the television viewers immersed, for those few important minutes, in persuasive product scenarios. These scenarios are meticulously designed to persuasively lead the human beings watching them to remember why it is, both, needful and important to purchase the advertised products. The combination of computer graphics and animation with television electronics has made the creation of commercials for industrial domestic products and government propaganda almost like the production of very short movies. Unlike video games, however, television and Internet commercials are not a matter of personal choice. You have to be very deliberately plugged-in to play computer video games according to personal decision, but commercials are interspaced between segments of television programs, documentaries, or television movies with intentional purpose. syfy.com/activate Unless people want to avoid commercials by turning-off their televisions or PC, or switching momentarily to other channels or websites not, at that particular time, in commercial mode, they are forced to watch, and listen to, the commercials. Believe it or not, approximately 99 percent of all Americans who subscribe to, and watch, cable television and Internet programs watch the commercials along with the scheduled shows that they are viewing. This is especially true for children, especially those youngsters 5-to-13 years of age.

In connection with my foregoing surmise of broadcasted network television commercials, I happened to watch, a while back, a particular snack food commercial on cable television that, to me, carried with it some grave social implications; and it was, as I saw it, but an example of many such commercials currently conveying the same negative implications. It was an approximately one-minute “Cheetos” commercial that involved computer animation, computer graphics, and precise acting choreography. It had suspenseful action music and an action scenario that showed a young boy, six-or-seven years of age dressed-up like a sniper, his older sister, and a male adult, sneaking up behind the boy’s mother, who was busily exercising, with a blow-gun through with which he hit her on her backside with a “Cheeto,” causing her alarm. In all of my formative years, from 1952 until 1969, growing-up in East Texas, I don’t ever recall seeing any type of television food commercial showing a child sneaking upon a mother, or any adult, and shooting her with a blow-gun. That’s simply because such television commercials were socially unacceptable at that time in history. That was when the main television station in my part of the country was KLTV, broadcasting from Tyler, Texas, which was plugged into the NBC Network. It was the time of the Chet Huntley and David Brinkley news reporting, “Bonanza,” and the original “Fugitive,” with David Janssen, and a totally different collective national mindset about morals and electronic advertising. My dad had proudly erected a 60 foot television antenna that drew in channels from Dallas, Shreveport, Fort Worth, and other television stations within a 100 mile radius. Television programming, and commercial production, at that time during the 20th Century, were geared to idealism and morality, which declared that there were definite and clearly delineated rights and wrongs to all social issues, not the pragmatism that flippantly proclaimed that the end results of endeavors, or investments, justified the means used to achieve them.