在过去的几个世纪里，家庭和教师是对儿童的最主要的影响，有时甚至是唯一的。 然而，今天大众文化（广播媒体，报纸，杂志，互联网和流行音乐）所产生的影响往往更大。
In centuries past, family and teachers were the dominant, and sometimes the only, influence on children. Today, however, the influence exerted by mass culture (the broadcast media, newspapers, magazines, Internet and popular music)often is greater.
到18岁时，青少年平均在教室里花了11,000个小时，在电视机前花了22,000个小时。 他/她也许上了13,000个课时，但是看了至少750,000个广告。 到了35岁，同一个人上了不过20,000个课时，但已经看45,000小时左右的电视和将近200万个广告。
By age 18 the average teenager has spent 11,000 hours in the classroom and 22,000 hours in front of the television set. He or she has had perhaps 13,000 school lessons yet has watched more than 750,000 commercials. By age thirty-five the same person has had fewer than 20,000 school lessons yet has watched approximately 45,000 hours of television and close to 2 million commercials.
大众文化对我们有什么影响？ 要回答这个问题，我们只需要考虑媒体中常用的格式和设备。 现代广告通常用名人的口碑和推荐书轰炸公众。 这种方法旨在吸引情绪并为产品和服务创造人为需求。 结果，许多人养成了对这种呼吁回应的习惯,往往是情绪化的，冲动的，容易受骗的。 他们也倾向于获得与家庭和学校教授的价值观截然不同的价值观。 广告经常把戏剧描绘成比工作更充实，自我满足比自我控制更令人满意，而物质主义比理想主义更有意义。
What effects dose mass culture have on us? To answer, we need only consider the formats and devices commonly used in the media. Modern advertising typically bombards the public with slogans and testimonials by celebrities. This approach is designed to appeal to emotions and create artificial needs for products and services. As a result, many people develop the habit of responding emotionally, impulsively, and gullible to such appeals. They also tend to acquire values very different from those taught in the home and the school. Ads often portray play as more fulfilling than work, self-gratification as more desirable than self-control, and materialism as more meaningful than idealism.
电视节目制作者经常使用场景转换和感官诉求，例如车祸，暴力和性接触，以防止观众不再感兴趣。然后他们经常增加商业片段。本文作者分析了电视观众的注意力转移。例如，在戏剧性节目中，注意力转移可能包括摄像机角度变化;故事情节从一组角色（或子情节）转移到另一组，或从现在的场景转移到过去的场景（闪回），或幻想;并转向“新闻报道”，商业广告，从一个广告到另一个广告，再回到节目。还包括可能是商业广告中发生的注意力转移。我发现每小时多达78次切换，不包括商业广告中的切换。商业广告中的切换次数从6到54不等，平均每15秒商业广告中有17次。注意力转移的总数达到每小时800多个，或者说每分钟超过14个。
Television programmers use frequent scene shifts and sensory appeals such as car crashes, violence, and sexual encounters to keep audience interest from diminishing. Then they add frequent commercial interruptions. This author has analyzed the attention shifts that television viewers are subjected to. In a dramatic program, for example, attention shifts might include camera angle changes; shifts in story line from one set of characters(or subplot) to another, or from a present scene to a past scene(flashback), or to fantasy; and shifts to "newsbreaks", to commercial breaks, from one commercial to another, and back to the program. Also included might be shifts of attention that occur within commercials. I found as many as 78 shifts per hour, excluding the shifts within commercials. The number of shifts within comercials ranged from 6 to 54 and averaged approximately 17 per fifteen-second commercial. The total number of attention shifts came out to over 800 per hour, or over 14 per minute.
这种操纵阻止了许多人发展成熟的注意力。 他们希望教室和工作场所能够从电视中获得同样持续的兴奋。 当然，这是一个不可能的要求，当他/她没有得到满足时，他们会说他们的老师很无聊，他们的工作也不称心。 因为这些人很少有耐心阅读需要思考的书籍，许多出版商已经用名人写的简装版替换了严肃的书籍。
This manipulation has prevented many people from developing a mature attention span. They expect the classroom and the workplace to provide the same constant excitement they get from television. That, of course, is an impossible demand, and when it isn't met they call their teachers boring and their work unfulfilling. Because such people seldom have the patience to read books that require them to think, many publishers have replaced serious books with light fare written by celebrities.
即使严肃书籍的作者确实成为出版作家，他们也经常被指示在促销见面会上给出简短而戏剧性的答案，有时却以准确性为代价。 作家参加脱口秀节目，有人提供了这样一个建议：“如果问你预算赤字是好主意还是坏主意，你就不应该说，'好吧，它刺激了经济，但却带来了负担'。 你必须得这么说'这是个好主意！' 或者'这是一个糟糕的主意！' 无论哪个都没关系。”（翻译：”不要给出一个中立的答案。给一个极简的答案，因为这样才会获得关注。“）
Even when writers of serious books do manage to become published authors, they are often directed to give short, dramatic answers during promotional interviews, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. A man who coaches writers for talk shows offered one client this advice: "If I ask you whether the budget deficit is a good thing or a bad thing, you should not say, 'Well, it stimulates the economy but it passes on a burden.' You have to say 'It's a great idea!" or 'It's a terrible idea!' It doesn't matter which." (Translation: "Don't give a balanced answer. Give an oversimplified one because it will get you noticed.")
印刷新闻业也处于轰动效应之中。 正如一位报纸编辑观察到的那样，“记者们一直在努力在1-10中找1或者9，而不是3到7[不突出的位置]，虽然大多数实际上都这样。” 另一位记者称，“新闻现在变成越来越多的观点，而不是经过验证的事实。新闻记者正在走进娱乐圈，而不是告诉已验证事实，那才是我们需要知道的。”
Print journalism is also in the grip of sensationalism. As a newspaper editor observed, "Journalists keep trying to find people who are at 1 or at 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 rather than people at 3 to 7 [the more moderate positions] where most people actually are." Another journalist claims, "News is now becoming more opinion than verified fact. Journalists are slipping into entertainment rather than telling us the verified facts we need to know."
今天的政客往往比记者更多地在操纵人。 一些政治家没有表达他们的想法，而是找出人们的想法并假装分享他们的想法。 许多政治家找出民意调查的情况，并集中几类，来了解哪些信息会“得民心”。 他们甚至可以测试某些词语的影响 - 这就是为什么我们这些日子以来，听到很多关于“信任”，“家庭”，“性格”和“价值观”的原因。 政治学教授拉里·萨巴托说，在克林顿弹劾审判期间，总统的顾问使用了“私人生活”一词 - 詹姆斯·卡维尔在一次四分钟的演讲中使用了六次 - 因为他们知道这可以说服人们相信，总统在誓言下撒谎，没有什么大不了的。
Today's politicians often manipulate people more offensively than do journalists. Instead of expressing their thoughts, some politicians find out what people think and pretend to share their ideas. Many politicians find out what people to conduct polls and focus groups to learn what messages will "sell." They even go so far as to test the impact of certain words-that is why we hear so much about "trust," "family," "character," and "values" these days. Political science professor Larry Sabato says that during the Clinton impeachment trial, the president's advisors used the term private lives over and over-James Carville used it six times in one four-minute speech-because they knew it could persuade people into believing the president's lying under oath was of no great consequence.
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