Tecnologia Y Nuestros Hijos

Advertisement and our Children
Fred Rogers was gentle man who devoted his entire adult life to educating and bettering the lives of children. He showed his concern on the effect of Media on children in many ways. This is what he said “We need desperately, I feel, a noncommercial alternative to what commercialism is trying to do to us. I'm not for censorship, but I'm certainly for self-censorshipwhen it comes to producing or purveying products to America's children. I think that for people who make anything for children, their first thought should be: Would I want my child to see, hear or touch this? And if the answer is no, just don't make it” (Rogers).
Ever since mass media became mass media, companies have used this means of communication to let the public know of their products.This action is clearly defined by the online Merriam Webster Dictionary definition of advertising “the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements” (“Advertisement”). These “announcements” of product and ideas are transmitted through various mode of mass communications in today’s society, visual modes such as printed newspapers, magazines billboards;and other modes that combine visual and audio such as radio, television, internet and mobile phones.
The advancement in technology throughout the 20th century has sophisticated the methods and techniques being used in advertisement though the ages. From the early 1900s with radio television and early 21st century the internet and mobile phones, advertisements have shown to have become a majorindustry in our society. In the United States in 1968, the advertising industry spent $18 billion in 1968, which 12% of it was aimed at children. In 2001 the United States spent $230 billion with as much as 18% of it aimed at children. The growth within 33 years has been almost 1,200 % showing the growth of the industry, but its aim at children has been significantly the same with some increase.Children have been exposed to all sorts of media since the start of the industry. Today, however, they are being allured as much as adults by advertisement “enticing and shaping and even creating consumerism and needs where there has been none before, or turning luxuries into necessities” (Espejo). This appeal of consumerism to our children by today’s advertisements is destructive to our children,by promoting materialism and consumption, and the key to its effectiveness should be limited or monitored by their parents.
The advertising industry assists and benefits our society and our economy in different ways, as Stephen Unwin describes in his article titled “How advertisement and the economy work together” advertisement benefits “the specialization of production, competition in homogeneousmarkets, price information, the business cycle, employment, added net wealth, and advanced and developing economies,” all this done through providing information of existing products and services to the consumers (Unwin). However, Professor of economics Phillip Nelson, in his paper entitled “Advertisement as information”, states that those who advertise their product are not interested in solelyproviding information, but to sell more of their product by saying anything they wish.
This ability of the seller to have the message say anything he/she wishes (Unwin), shows the manipulation that the companies have over the consumer as they advertise their products and services. People are influenced by advertisements to buy things they don’t need. These discretionary purchases are beingdriven by personal desires and emotions (Danzinger). As Pamela N. Dazinger states, marketers must overcome objections by the consumers into buying products by justifiers, tools used to overcome these objections. Marketers today are determining if people’s lives are fulfilling or not, they decide if what we have on our lives is sufficient to consider it to be good enough or not, to them, our lives...