Say no to the cartoon violence effectively

Since 1950s, watching cartoons in televisions has started to become normal in the daily life of children. The great popularity of cartoons made some scholars and other groups worry that the cartoon violence would encourage more aggressive actions in children since they may simply imitate what they see frequently in cartoons but not mature enough to distinguish the rights and wrongs. To prevent the undistinguished imitation of cartoon violence, some countries adopted various methods. But the most effective method, in my mind, is to engage parents and educate children to treat cartoons correctly.

To reduce the negative effect of the cartoon violence, prohibiting the broadcasting of animations which contain aggression in televisions seems to be the simplest way. The solution requires the interruption from administrative agencies. The government agency usually releases an announcement to restrict television stations to broadcast the cartoons that do not pass the censorship procedure. The censorship that aims at filtering out the unsuitable cartoons is also held by the government. In the reality of 2008, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television of China released an announcement. According to the announcement, a group of animations, including some of the very popular ones like Gundam and One Piece, would be prohibited from being broadcasted because of their violent contents.

But the method of prohibiting the broadcasting of violent cartoons can easily become invalid because of Internet. With no doubt, Internet becomes a more and more important way for people to search for information. Giant information can be stored on Internet permanently. Massive amount and permanentness are the most outstanding advantages of Internet, which make totally deleting the already uploaded but newly prohibited cartoons difficult. The difficulty of the execution of the ban ensures that children can still watch the violent animations on Internet. For example, the two cartoons, Gundam and One Piece, which were officially banned in the Mainland China, can still be found in a lot of websites.

Moreover, simply using a ban may encourage the copyright infringement. Piracy can happen as people are unable to watch the prohibited cartoons in TV stations so Internet seems to be the only channel to watch them. The great demand of available Internet resources may encourage some people to upload the prohibited cartoons to the Internet illegally. The offence of copyright not only damages the interest of animation producers, but also has a bad influence on the enforcement of copyright laws.

Another solution is to use photoshop technique to remove the scene of blood and weapons in cartoons in animations or replace weapons with other harmless objects. For the solution, both the scene removal and replacement are to prevent the violent elements from being watched by children. Kids can only see the peaceful and bloodless scenes in cartoons. And only the dealt cartoons that originally contain violence can be broadcasted in TV stations. This standard is common in US and Thailand. In Thailand, the blood and weapons appearing in cartoons are just blurred by mosaic. The mosaic makes children only see the foggy scene when violent elements appear. But the similar method is used more delicately in US. America once dealt with the cartoon, One Piece, through carefully removing the blood and replacing guns and knifes with harmless toys.

But using photoshop skills to deal with the animations which have violent contents is not quite effective since it is high-cost. Plenty of resources are essential for the photoshop work since the work requires employees who are familiar with the image processing skills to spend thousands of hours dealing with animations. What’s more, some of the cartoons even have several hundred episodes. The long length of them can greatly increase the workload and cost more resources – including time, money and human resources. Obviously, the extra input may give a heavier burden to the TV stations.

The experience of audience when they watch the dealt cartoons can also influence the effectiveness of using photoshop skills. Once the photoshop technique is used indelicately to deal with the cartoon, like simply using mosaic to cover the blood and weapons, the scene in animations will look inharmonious and ugly. The unpleasant scenes appearing in cartoons will definitely reduce the quality of the cartoon. And the reduced quality makes the experience of children of watching animations less delightful. The unpleasant experience of audience is adverse to the business of the TV stations.

My suggestion to solve the cartoon violence problem is to engage parents and educate children with the rights and wrongs in cartoons. The former one needs the community to engage parents through posters, brochures or other media, asking them to control the access of children to televisions and Internet and help their kids to choose the suitable cartoons to watch. The later method requires schools to spare some attention to which cartoons children watch and how they see the behaviors in the cartoons, teaching them the rights and wrongs of the behaviors and telling them not to imitate the wrong actions which include the violence.

The final suggested method is made after considering some of the shortage of the previous two solutions and that is why the method can be more effective than the other two. The previous solutions either did not consider the powerfulness of the Internet or would cost a lot. But the great impact of Internet is limited since adults control the access to the Internet at home. Moreover, the cost of community engagement with parents is low as the main expenses are used in producing posters or brochures. And the cost of school education can be ignored as teachers just need to spend some time talking about the topic with children.

Educating children with the rights and wrongs of the behaviors in cartoons, in another way, can be considered as active mediation. Active mediation is generally defined as helping people to improve self-awareness. As what was said before, the self-awareness of children is weak so they cannot judge between right and wrong in cartoons effectively. But the effectiveness of making those judgments can be improved so that even they have watched the cartoon violence, the aggressive tendency of children can be removed. This result has already been proved by researchers. They did experiments and found that the children who received active mediation, at a certain level, did not show the intention of aggression. (Nathanson and Cantor, 2010)

Generally speaking, educating children with the rights and wrongs in cartoons and engaging parents are much more effective than banning the cartoon which contains violence or using photoshop technique to deal with cartoons. The ban cannot stop children from watching the violent cartoons since they can switch from televisions to the Internet; the photoshop technique may cost a lot and receive bad feedbacks from audience; only engaging parents can ensure children to watch suitable animations and make them unable to surf the Internet freely; school education to help children treat cartoons correctly has been proved useful and moreover, it costs a little. So the combination of engaging parents and school education can be an effective solution to protect children from the cartoon violence.

Reference:

1.     Nathanson, Amy I. and Cantor, Joanne. (2010, June 7^th). Reducing the Aggression-Promoting Effect of Violence Cartoons by Increasing Children’s Fictional Involvement with the Victim: A Study of Active Mediation. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. 125 – 142.

What should I major in?

    For every university student, major choosing is an essential and important procedure. The procedure also happened to me during my first year in the City University of Hong Kong (cityu).  My university at that time provided me six College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) majors to choose. Choosing one from six was not easy since they seemed have their own advantages. The advantages for two majors – Translation and Interpretation (CTL) and Media and Communication (COM), however, were comparatively more outstanding than those of the others because of their application procedures.

    The general procedure of applying a major in cityu was submitting a major preference form and then waiting for a confirmation. While between the two steps, sometimes there could be a new step. An interview might be conducted by a program to see if the student was well qualified. Such an examination, with no doubt, increased the difficulty of appliers getting admitted into the major. As a result, the difficulty made some students, including me, switch their choices to majors with a general application procedure. This kind of majors in the six majors offered by the CLASS just had CTL and COM included. The two programs simply required a “the most preferred major” answer in the major choosing form of their appliers. Students who had submitted the form needed to do nothing – except waiting for an admission.

     After getting admitted into a certain program, students will start the major study. Actually, the study naturally is to train students with professional skills and knowledge since these skills and knowledge may be required by the future career of students and be applied to a particular field. For example, the application field of mathematics is much broader than that of accounting since basically accounting may be only applied to the field of accounting where mathematics can be also practiced. And mathematics can moreover be used in the field of computer programming, construction engineering, scientific research and other areas. Generally speaking, a broader application field of a major means more choices and a better chance of success in job hunting. Benefits like this were quite available in CTL and COM during my freshman year. CTL taught translation skills which could be practiced in business, government agencies and educational institutions. And COM could apply what it taught to the industry of advertising, journalism, broadcasting, public relations and new media. Comparing with the broad application field of CTL and COM, that field of the rest four majors in CLASS – Asian and International Studies, English, Public Policy and Applied Social Studies, was quite limited since their graduates might only emerge as a member of government agencies or practice their knowledge in academic studies. The limitation helped me to remove the four from the six options so that only CTL and COM were left in the final round.

    The hesitation between CTL and COM no long existed after I checking the resources provided by the two programs.  Both of them allowed students to use various kinds of equipment like machines for simultaneous interpretation, broadcasting studios and video editing rooms to improve their personal abilities. These abilities could get exercised well through an internship. Internship opportunities which counted a lot for me were available in CTL and COM but they were different in their effectiveness. The effectiveness of an internship opportunity may be influenced by platforms where the internship is conducted and the degree of participation of interns. A platform from an elite organization where a high-efficient and standardized working procedure is executed can help interns to get a better understanding in a certain industry and the active participation of interns can get them adequately exercised. Benefits brought by a good platform and involvement had been more available in the internship offered by COM rather than that in CTL. COM would invite students to intern in Phoenix, Asia, China Daily and some other companies which played as leaders in Hong Kong media industry. These powerful media corporations required students to function as regular employees and contribute to its daily operations. But CTL provided more internship opportunities in a publisher which mainly distributed proofreading jobs which barely had something to do with translation. Such internship experiences might have weak effectiveness. And the weakness finally pushed me to become a student of COM.

Descriptive Writing - My Cousin

    At the first sight, my cousin, Mr. Xiao is a man who can easily ignored. A height of 5 feet, 6 inches does not make him outstanding as it is a common height that the majority of male adults can reach to –neither too short nor too high. He is not fat or skinny, just the average build of a man. Even his hair style is quite common, a crew cut has been kept from his childhood to today. His face is narrow and long with a pair of small eyes which usually give others a feeling that he is falling asleep.  Perhaps he has spent too much time staying at home, the skin color of him is the same as that of a whitewashed wall. He is deeply in love with causal styles of clothes – shirts and jeans in black, grey or dark blue and with few patterns.
    Though it is difficult to find some highlights from his appearance, the judgment of Xiao being an ordinary person can be turned upside down after chatting with him for half an hour. They would agree that Mr. Xiao is a charming and amusing person. When having a conversation with someone, his back often remains straight like a birch. It makes him appear energetically and heartily. People may feel he is really into the conversation since he would keep facing them, looking into their eyes and responding with feedbacks. When he talks, his voice is deep but strong like the sound from playing a cello; his speech is continuous and fluent, just like that he is repeating a written text; his language is humorous as he is good at making jokes and listing examples to enrich the content of what he says. What’s more, it is easy to find him amazingly knowledgeable. He can tell you how the advanced mathematics is applied to programming. When talking about the newest laptop with him, Xiao is able to list the advantages and disadvantages of it after comparing with the previous products.  And he can identify whether a piece of music belongs to Chopin or Liszt through listening.

    The personal style of Mr. Xiao is contradictory. In most of his time, he has a low-speed lifestyle which is similar with the elder. It may take half an hour for Xiao to finish a bowl of rice. He only takes a small bite every time and would not stop chewing until the food cannot grind down any finer. No matter when he walks, he walks slowly, just like that he is wandering in a garden and enjoying the beautiful natural scenes. When he stays at home, it may give others a feeling that he is a statue as he spends much of his time sitting on a chair with few moves. But the situation would be totally different when he starts to work. In his senior year in university, he finished reading four 500-page books every week for his essay. After graduation, he became a composer. Then his mother started to complain about her son destroying her sleepiness at late night since whenever the inspiration hits him, even he has already gone to bed, he would immediately rushes to his piano, playing his new song. He always maintains a painstaking and passionate condition when working. I guess that is why his mother has decided to relocate the noise barrier in his bedroom and the study.