ABSTRACT
School children in the industrialised countries spend an average of 24 hours every week watching television, nearly six hours listening to radio and music and three hours reading comics, newspapers, magazines and books. To these figures should be added cinema attendance and the increasing use of video. Roughly speaking, the 30-odd hours of weekly exposure to the mass media compares markedly with the 20odd hours spent by children in the classroom. (World Communication Report, 1987)
These quotes and statistics show clearly how boy students’ lives are deeply shaped by the media, particularly when schoolroom time is set against media exposure time. It’s also important to recognize how television dominates other forms of the media. Neil Postman (1979) has convincingly argued that the media, and especially television, represents an unofficial curriculum. We believe that this secret curriculum is powerfully influential in providing a destructive masculinity training in the everyday lives of boys. This doesn’t come about through accident. The media industry is tightly organized and it’s big business. It makes a massive financial investment in researching and trying to expand its potential markets. It uses research evidence on consumers to target particular interest groups, like adolescent boys with Nintendo’s promotion of video games like Streetfighter 1 and 2.
