Impacts of Electronic Media on Children and Adults

The paper highlights the negative impacts of excessive electronic media usage on children and adults. It emphasizes the need for public awareness about the ill-effects of gaming addiction, which can lead to behavioral changes, reduced academic performance, and decreased long-term concentration ability. The research also explores the psychological aspects of arcade gaming and its relation to real-life gambling and mental health issues. Furthermore, it discusses the role of parents in monitoring their children's gaming patterns and suggests that suitable games should be chosen based on maturity level and mental engagement required.

Running head: Impacts of Electronic media
Impacts of Electronic Media

Impacts of Electronic media 1
Executive Summary
This paper is an attempt to identify the impacts of excessive usage of electronic media on
children as well as adults. This paper also highlights the need to bring the seriousness of the issue
in the attention of the public. Moreover, the research paper also reflects the scope of the usage of
electronic media and measures the impact by using the previous research work.
Recommendations addressing the limitations of the community authorities are also made at the
end of the paper.
The main reason for choosing such a topic for research is the heavy amount negative
impacts that occur to the people of different age groups. It is believed that children spending
more time in playing violent games are more likely to go through significant changes in their
behavior which may be aggressive in nature. Time spent by them in other activities such as
sports, reading, and interactions with friends reduces significantly. Sometimes children get
confused between the real life and the fantasy world. Academic performance of kids may get
negatively affected by gaming addiction. Studies have also suggested that gaming addiction may
even result in sufficiently damage one’s long-term concentration ability. It is very important that
more debates should be held in public on such issues so that people can be made aware of the ill-
effects of excessive gaming.
With the advent of electronic media, the world has seen a lot of developments in the
fields of information and technology, advertisements, communication, and entertainments.
Despite offering a great deal of uses, electronic media is still a topic of debate because of its
excessive misuse. Electronic media is mainly used being today for entertainment purpose of
children and adults (Yadav & Kaur, 2016). It has been noticed in the research that children
mainly use the electronic media for the purpose of playing video games while adults mainly use
it for the purpose social networking on the internet. The introduction of electronic media was
seen as a useful thing in the beginning, but in a very short time, various forms of addictions
related to electronic media usage came into existence with children as well as adults. While
evaluating the impacts of electronic media over children's thought process, it was observed from
the data that gaming addiction is more likely occur in children of young age than on adults. The
adults who became addicted to gaming at early stages of their lives find it difficult to give up
gaming. It has been noticed that such use of electronic media is not limited to a certain group of
children. Instead, it is found to be common in all genders and age groups regardless of children's
distinct social and economic backgrounds (Dingle & Kothari, 2015). Children of smaller age
groups are so much inclined towards video games and movies that they even miss their schools
and meals because of their addiction towards these. Social media activities such as message
texting and sexting are common in elder group of children which may victimize anyone.
However, as per the analysis, it has been found females are more likely to be victimized than
males.
While examining the psychological aspects of arcade genre of gaming, it has been found
that beginning of the addiction to arcade gambling would result in real life gambling which may
negatively impact the brains of youth (Rickers et al., 2016). It was found that availability of

Impacts of Electronic media 2
internet in abundance was one of the causes of attracting the youth towards arcade gaming. The
research has led to a serious relationship between the addiction of internet gaming and the mental
and physical health of kids. While evaluating the trends of the time spent by students in internet
gaming, it was observed that students were likely to develop sleeplessness and loneliness.
Internet gaming can be considered as negatively affecting the social functioning of the gamers.
Various faults in the censorship and legislation done by the government on electronic
media were also found. Findings have revealed that it should be the concern of the parents to
ensure that their kids are not getting addicted to any particular genre of games (Bul, 2016). On
the contrary, from the statistical data of the research, it has also been revealed that the
introduction of violent games to the juvenile minds has dramatically reduced the crime attempted
by juveniles. It was found that the interference of legislation and government may negatively
affect the children in differentiating between the entertainment and addiction and parents should
volunteer to take the responsibility of keeping an eye over the gaming patterns of their children.
It has been recommended that parents should consider their child’s maturity level in order
to check the suitability of the games for their children. It is suggested that those should be picked
which require the players to make strategies and decisions in the gaming environments instead of
those involving stealing and killing activities (Choo, 2015). Overall, players should not only
evaluate the games on the basis of violence and obscenity contained in them; rather they should
evaluate the games according to the level of mental engagement required in the gameplay.

Impacts of Electronic media 3
References
Yadav, J. S. & Kaur, S. (2016), “Addiction of Electronic Media in Children: A Major Problem”,
Indian Psychological Foundation.
Dingle, D. A. & Kothari Jay, (2015), “Psychiatric Impacts of Video Games, Internet
Addiction on Children” Psychiatry Advisor.
Rikkers, W., Lawrence, D., Hafekost, J., & Zubrick, S. R. (2016). Internet use and electronic
gaming by children and adolescents with emotional and behavioural problems in Australia–
results from the second Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing. BMC
public health, 16(1), 399.
Bul, K. C., Kato, P. M., Van der Oord, S., Danckaerts, M., Vreeke, L. J., Willems, A., &
Franken, I. H. (2016). Behavioral outcome effects of serious gaming as an adjunct to treatment
for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a randomized controlled trial. Journal
of medical Internet research, 18(2).
Choo, H., Sim, T., Liau, A. K., Gentile, D. A., & Khoo, A. (2015). Parental influences on
pathological symptoms of video-gaming among children and adolescents: a prospective
study. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 24(5), 1429-1441.