Перевести текст, может у кого-то есть? growing up with the media by p. g. aldrich what do you remember most about your childhood? running through the long dewy grass of a meadow or the saturday morning tv cartoons? sitting in the kitchen watching your mother cook supper or sitting in the living-room watching captain kangaroo! [1] which came first on sunday morning — breakfast or the comics? now bring your memories up to date. what did you and your friends talk about, at least part of the time, before class? an item from a newspaper? an ad that you noticed in a magazine or a television commercial? an episode from a popular tv series? a movie? or a new record that you heard on the radio? if your answers parallel those of most young people, you add to the proof that mass media play a large and influential part in your life. your answers also prove just how casually (мимоходом) you accept the media, just as you accept the house you live in, cars, electricity, telephones, your school, and your family as part of your environment. parents and teachers agree that all young people growing up with the media learn from them sometimes more than adults wish you to. (and this is the cause for alarm.) if the use of them referring to media in the last sentence seems strange, remember that the word media linguistically is plural. when people make a fuss about the media being a bad influence, they usually are talking about television, the most powerful medium of all. maybe calling television the media can be justified technically because, as a medium, it embraces functions of several media such as newspapers, magazines, movies, and recordings. the major media can be divided into two kinds, print and electronic. the print media - newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets, catalogues, circulars, brochures, anything you read — are the oldest, dating back to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. the electronic media — radio, television, films of all kinds, records, tapes, anything that is transmitted by the use of electricity — are less than a hundred years old. another meaning the word mass suggests is "the people", a phrase too often associated with adjectives like dull-witted, credulous (легковерный), ill-informed, uncritical, and passive. or are the mass of people well-informed, sophisticated, thoughtful, and active? which are you? how much of what you know about yourself has been taught you by the media? you may not realize how greatly the media influence you because in your lifetime they have always been there. in fact, short of deliberate isolation on a mountain top or being lost in a forest and reared by wolves, no one will ever again grow up without the presence and influence of the mass media. is this good or bad? an experiment recently conducted in europe by the society for rational psychology showed that watching television is psychologically addictive. the idea of becoming addicted to television brings up questions involving subtle conditioning and brainwashing that could be friendly or vicious, altruistic or self-serving. in a commercial society the media's ability to stimulate motivation to buy — almost as though people were puppets on strings — builds other people's power. it can be power for good or power for bad, but it is always power for control. all these negative aspects of growing up with the media need consideration, at the same time you are enjoying the positive aspects of immediately knowing what's going on in the world, sharing great entertainment and historical events with everyone else in our "global village", and having the fun of trying out a new product that you wouldn't have known about without advertising.