Media Influence on Young Adults Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Media Influence on Young Adults - Research Paper Example Young adulthood is a confusing time in life. On one hand, you are too old to act childishly. On the other hand, you aren’t quire old enough to be taken as seriously as an adult would be. Therefore, many young adults struggle to find a midpoint between the two. This is no simple task. â€Å"Young adults are striving daily to formulate their identity†¦Young adults, perhaps more impressionable than they would like to admit, use the media as a major source of identity formation. The media also represent a common ground that young people share. From the media they acquire a set of guidelines to follow, both moral and stylistic,† (Ornstein). There is a great division between the set of guidelines young people acquire from media, as Ornstein distinguishes. Morally, one can argue that there are many more sources for a young adult to learn from. Many young adults begin to establish their morals by seeding out what they like and dislike from the morals they have been raised with. There is a framework for them to work with. This is not as much the case, however, with stylistic preferences and values. There are millions of media images bombarding us these days. In fact, the definition of media has expanded so much in the last decade that the term media seems to be an umbrella term. With all these images, it is practically impossible not to be influenced. As I said earlier, young adults are especially susceptible to the influence of media. Because they are in such a transitional period in their lives, young adults soak up information from anywhere they can get it. Using this information, they â€Å"try on† different personas, seeking out what works for them. Aesthetically, this holds a number of possibilities almost as large as the number of media influences available to young adults today. With luck, young adults will model themselves after a worthy role model with an admirable image, leading the young adult to develop into a similarly admirable person. As we all know, however, many times this is not the case. There are many media images that are available to young adults w hich glamorize otherwise negative physical traits. There are many ways in which the media images of beauty can negatively affect a young adult. One of the most common instances which this occurs is with body image. Magazines are a typical example of this. According to a study of 104 adults on media use, â€Å"Magazines were read for information on current fashions, recipes, and health issues†¦Reading magazines gave respondents feelings of sexiness, self-esteem, luxury and creativity,† (Survey Asks Young Adults about Media use). One can gather that if young adults are accrediting their self-esteem to reading magazines, that the images in them naturally must be influential. There are a wide variety of images in a magazine targeted toward young adults. Many of these images are advertisements that are geared at selling products to these young adults, many times by young adult celebrities. Couple the controversy surrounding the premature sexualization of young adult celebriti es with the survey results that associate sexiness with , it isn’