Video Games’ impacts on children’s life

Video games construct important part of children’s daily life. We can observe that many children spend time on playing popular video games after school, like Warcraft, Star Wars and CS. It puts various impacts on children. This blog post will analyze those impacts.

Firstly, video games provide authentic reading experience to children and help them to improve comprehension ability. Children do lots of reading and improve their comprehension of narrative texts, in order to understand contents of video games and play games effectively (Heron-Hruby & Alvermann, 2009). Video games always contain many introductions of scenes and settings of virtual worlds, like outer space in star wars. They also include descriptions to show main features and skills of different characters. For instance, Warcraft describes each main character’s life experience and combat skills, like Jaina Proudmoore. If children want to play a video game, they have to understand those texts accurately. So children’s reading comprehension abilities have improved a lot during the process. Besides, it is a deep experience of reading with real needs. A child usually plays a specific role in a video game and become one part of that story, which makes him or her has a deep understanding of that story and real experience of reading (Beavis, 2012).

（the world view of Warcraft）

Secondly, video games can strengthen children’s ability to use digital technology effectively. Video game is a mixture of language, visual symbols and sounds that created by digital technologies. So children become familiar with digital technologies by playing video games frequently. And children need to analyze interrelations of those symbols, in order to understand the stories shown in video games. During the process of playing video games, children know how to interpret and use multimodal elements of digital media. It is a foundation of using digital technology (Serafini, 2014). For instance, when they heard weird music or sounds, they know characters may meet dangers next in the scenes of video games and begin to observe their screens carefully. Video games also guide children to learn how to use software and digital tools (Serafini, 2014). For instance, children often use on-line tools to discuss with group members in video games. This digital skill will increase children’s competitiveness to get jobs in the future, because a large amount of working places in developed countries use digital tools in 21st century.

(multimodal information in digital world)

Thirdly, video games can help children to understand social rules and promote their socialization. The virtual world inside a video game still has social rules and orders like real society and the plot development of story follows social principles and logics. When children play a video game, they follow those social rules and cooperate with social system in the virtual world. It increases their tendencies to adapt to social rules and structures, which builds solid foundation of socialization in the future. O’Brien and Bauer (2005) find video games shape children’s identities as team member and lead them to do collaborative work. Many video games divide participants to different teams. Each team should create a clear plan together and give suitable tasks to members. They need to communicate with each other and negotiate ideas openly. This is kind of preparation of joining social division of labor in the future.

Although video games have many positive functions, we should notice that there are some negative influences on children’s development. There are some inappropriate information contained in video games that do harm to children’s mental health and behavior management (Engerman, 2016). For instance, some video games use wonderful visual effects to beautify violent actions, so children may think violence is pretty good. And characters in video games choose to solve problems by beating others or killing enemies and get no punishment, which gives children a hint that violence is an effective tool in real society. Other example is some video games use female characters with busty breast and sexy clothes to attract boys. This will bring negative sides to sex education of children.

References

Beavis, C. (2012). Video games in the classroom : developing digital literacies. Practically Primary, 17(1), 17–20.

Engerman, J., & Carr-Chellman, A. (2016). Call of duty for adolescent boys: An ethnographic phenomenology of the experiences within a gaming culture (Doctoral dissertation). Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses database. (AAT 10296976)

Heron-Hruby, A., & Alvermann, D.E. (2009). Implications of adolescents’ popular culture use for school literacy. In K.D. Wood & W.E. Blanton (Eds.), Literacy instruction for adolescents: Research-based practices. (pp. 210–230). New York: Guilford.

O’Brien, D. G., & Bauer, E. B. (2005). New literacies and the institution of old learning. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(1), 120-131.  https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.40.1.7

Serafini, F. (2014). Reading the visual : an introduction to teaching multimodal literacy . New York: Teachers College Press.7

South Korean Popular Culture in China

Many romantic TV series from South Korean are very popular in China. In those dramas, men always do full-time job and can decide all the important things in the family, but women often do not have jobs and rely on men’s income to survive. This meets traditional gender role in East Asian society that man’s role is leader with masculine characteristics and independent thinking, and women act like caring person in families with mild temper and strong maternal instincts.

Those dramas often show men’s images as strong, tall and powerful. Women’s images are represented as soft, weak and helpless. Woman lived a very bad life, then, she met a strong man who fell in love with her. Finally, she was rescued from bad life by that powerful man. I can see many dramas that show this plot model, like Models, Tomato and The Heirs.

Those dramas often laugh at those women who have good performance in their working places, in order to strengthen gender role in people’s minds. For example, in popular TV Series Star in My Heart, female leader in fashion design industry is described so mean and cold blood. And she is viewed by others as a loser among women, because of her struggle between family life and her excellent job performance.

Pop dance from South Korean is also popular among teenagers in China. Traditional dances in Asian society are soft and slow, and dancers try to imitate crane that represent elegant style and gentleman’s value in Confucianism. Popular dance from South Korean totally break those rules. Dancers can move their bodies very quickly and freely with rhythmic pop music. Teenagers view it as an effective way to rebel tradition and old social order.

Chinese people also like South Korean Cuisine. Those TV series always show how beautiful girls make delicious food, like Kimchi, Korean rice cake and roasted pork. South Korean food contains a lot of chili, which is similar to Chinese food. So Chinese people can accept their taste easily.

Why women need to join the loss weight industry?

In popular culture that presented in TV, films and internet, there are ideal female images that are slim, thin and beautiful. Those women always keep dieting and try to control weight, which makes them look thin. Thin women in those media forms are viewed as successful role models who are smart and have successful career life. They also seem very sexy and enjoy love from men’s pursuits. But fat women who do not control eating food and weight are viewed as losers. They are stupid and do not have good working performance. They also seem not attractive to male and are lack of true love. Those typical images can be seen in various TV series (Berg, 2001), like Sex and the City, Gossip Girl and Friends.

（Sexy and the City by Eva Rinaldi
 available under a CC 2.0 ）

The ideal female images exist more obviously in popular advertisements. Many advertisements show their products with thin girls, in order to create a sense their products are successful and attractive to customers. For instance, top-brand car advertisements always use thin girls as models. Dior often uses female models who are young and slim to sale their products. This contains an idea that thin girls can show beauty of their products perfectly. A large amount of advertisements want to sale products that can help women to lose weight and become slim. For example, there are many advertisements about weight loss pills made by Swisse, Blackmore and Nature’s way.

（Advertisement from Dior Company in China under a CC 2.0

According to this idea in our society, there is a loss weight industry that combines those advertisements of loss weight and woman’s daily life. There are various loss weight clubs that post advertisement to say they can help you to lose weight successfully. Buy one year membership, they will give you a health tutor who forbids you to eat too much food and encourages you to continue this process. Many women around me see advertisements of loss weight pills and eat those pills instead of normal meals. In China, this loss weight industry has its own features. The loss weight industries say they can use traditional Chinese herbs to help woman lose weight.

(Picture from Swisse Company in China available under CC 2.0)

There is a consumer ideology behind those media about the loss weight industry. Those advertisements say you have some problems that need to fix, because you have a gap with ideal models or successful standards. And they also want to you to believe that you can solve the issue and become perfect by using their products (Schor, 2004). We can see this type of logic behind loss weight industry obviously. At first, you are exposed to a large amount of ideal female images that those media want to you to identify with. After long-time exposure, you accept thin female images and use them as standards to judge your own life. Finally, you follow to buy those products because your mind is controlled by the message that you can lose weight and become ideal woman by consuming those goods.

But this typical image can be viewed as stereotype, because it is unreasonable and unrealistic. People magazine published a study in 1996 found that the ideal woman is five inches taller than average woman, but real woman is thirty-two pounds fatter than ideal woman (White & Walker, 2008).That means women cannot reach the body size and standards like typical models if they eat normal meals. So it is unrealistic thing. Besides, the stereotype is lack of logic from historical and scientific views. Before 20^th century, women were viewed as important role that feed food to children and care the whole family. So their images at that time were not thin, but healthy and sometimes fat (Manton, 1999). Besides, the reason why people become fat is not totally answered in scientific field. Human being needs enough energy and nutrition from food. So it is unreasonable to push every woman to control their enjoyment from food.

This popular loss weight industry brings some negative impacts to our life. Women may have diseases, like eating disorder, malnutrition and lack of calcium, if they refuse to eat normal meal to control weight. Some loss weight products also do harm to human being. For instance, some medical reports show loss weight pills called Fen-phen can cause heart disease to women. Besides, it may create negative feelings that affect mental health. Many people are affected by egocentrism that they want imaginary audience to view them as ideal and perfect images and models (Parsons, Henson & Sardo-Brown, 2000). This psychological feature makes young girls easily to feel peer pressure if they think they are not like ideal female. As a teacher, I find sometimes thin girls laughed at fat girls based on typical stereotype, which makes fat girls lack of self-confidence and have social difficulties.

When we touch popular advertisements and products, we need to reflect and critique those contents and ideologies. Accept positive things, and critique negative sides.

References

Berg, F. M. (2001). Children and Teens Afraid to Eat: Helping youth in today’s weight-obsessed world. Hettinger: Healthy Weight Network.

Manton, C. (1999). Fed up: Women and food in America. Praeger Pub Text.

Parsons, R., Hinson, S. L., & Sardo-Brown, D. (2000). Educational psychology: A practitioner-researcher model of teaching. Wadsworth Publishing.

Schor, J. (2004). Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer culture. New York: Scribner.

White, C., & Walker, T. (2008). Tooning in : essays on popular culture and education . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

high culture VS popular culture? high culture VS youth culture?

There is a question about the distinction between popular culture and high culture. In traditional view, popular culture are regarded as the ‘other’ of high culture. F.R.Leavis (Leavis, 1930) said  high culture belongs to social elite who have high cultural taste and work as guardians of culture, so this type of culture contains high value which is totally different to popular culture that belongs to common people. From this view, the situation people prefer to popular culture means decline of both culture and morality. Conversely, postmodernism argue there is not obvious distinction between high culture and popular culture. The high culture is not perfect, and popular culture has some values. People in this modern society and digital age are surrounded by various media, like video, printed media, social media and radio. This gives people touch different types of cultures freely, and makes them have mixture cultural taste (Green, 2012). For instance, people can enjoy classical music like Beethoven, but they also like pop music, like hip-hop.

Other debate is about the distinction between youth culture and mainstream culture. Youth believe mainstream culture belongs to adult, but they have their special culture that is totally different to main culture. Adults cannot understand their youth culture, so youth culture is kind of subculture that is resistant to dominant social system and adult culture (Hall, Jefferson, 1976). Educators think there is no real distinction between youth culture and dominant culture, because youth’s cultural interest and adults’ interest often overlap, like they both like Hollywood movie and TV programs (Hunt, & Hunt, 2004).

Let me use an example of Goths to discuss those issues.

Goths is a very popular youth culture both in western countries and in China. Those teenagers wear black clothes and use black lipstick and eye make-up, in order to look pretty pale. They think only youth can understand and Goths culture has no relation to mainstream culture. They often use Goths as a resistance to adults’ world and to show their rebel youth identity.

But if we do some survey to the history of Goths, we will find the previous idea is not correct.

 The word Gothic was created in the 6^th century when Germanic people invaded Rome. People who appreciate culture of Ancient Roma and Greek think Gothic culture has low value and this culture is so rude.

From 13^th to 16^th century, Gothic culture began to find an important position in dominant culture. Many architectures abandoned classical architecture feel and began to add Gothic feel to those buildings. Even churches contain Gothic factors, like high minaret, window glass painted with Holy Bible’s stories and pointed arch.

In 18^th and 19^th century, Gothic culture became more dominant in literature field. Gothic mood was accepted and used widely in literature work, including poems, novels. This literature form often contain contents like supernatural events, sinister secrets, isolated settings and repression of desire, which gives it a feeling of mysterious ,weird and wacky.

Many literatures that we regard as high culture are affected or contain Gothic culture. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) describes a supernatural story of vampire Dracula. This story shows many settings of dark night and dangerous things like drinking human being’s blood, which is typical Gothic. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) used Gothic factor to make this story more mysterious and attractive. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray absorbed supernatural style from Gothic culture (1891).

As discussed above, we can see the Goths is not youth culture that only belongs to youth, because it has a long history in adults’ culture including architecture, music and high value literature. When youth touch Goths, they actually touch some parts of dominant culture. Also there is no obvious distinction between high culture and popular culture, like Gothic can be used in high value literature and churches.

References

Germann, G. (1972). Gothic revival in Europe and Britain: sources, influences, and ideas. London: Lund Humphries.

Green, D. (2012). Teens, TV and tunes: the manufacturing of American adolescent culture. NC: Mcfarland.

Hunt, T., & Hunt, B. (2004). New Voices: Popular Culture: Building Connections with Our Students. The English Journal, 93(3), 80–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/4128814

Leavis, F. R. (1930). Mass civilisation and minority culture. Folcroft:[s.n.].