This is taken from a scene in the Disney Channel Original series “Dog with a Blog.” This show blends the media age and ideas like “blogging” in a format for children.
Youth today are living under very different circumstances than even I was just ten to fifteen years ago. Children today are living in a digital age, bombarded by advertisements and commoditization. Children see this not only in television and film, but also in video games and the internet. They even meet Disney and other major media representations on smart phones and tablets. Now, for children, it appears, “there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets” (Grossberg 2005).
It is estimated that Americans on average spend more than six hours a day watching video based entertainment, and will soon match those numbers of hours we spend sleeping. The American Medical Association estimates that, “the combined hours spent in front of a television or video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an American child (Hazen 1997). Those figures were from 1997, imagine where we are at today with Netflix and many new on demand features available on television and the internet. Children are the most vulnerable to this exposure, which Disney seems to have recognized as they have recently spent around $180 million to expand their video games online and for gaming devices. Each film released has corresponding video games in multiple formats.
The case from ABC Family’s “Secret Life of the American Teenager.”
The real question when it comes to Disney’s impact on youth today is if a corporate controlled society distorts the sensibility of children. Although Disney Channel and films do not offer information about sex, drugs and other adult topics that could corrupt a young intellect or direct actions, they own and operate networks that have come under fire for use of sex and violence. The ABC Channel has offered shows with intense storylines and adult matters like teen pregnancy in The Secret Life of the American Teenager and murder in Pretty Little Liars. The impact of these shows and digital age will be better viewed in ten years as this generation ages, but Disney will definitely have an impact stronger than any other media conglomerate.
Works Cited
Lawrence Grossberg, “Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future,” (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 264.
Cited in Don Hazen and Julie Winokur, eds. “We the Media, “(New York: New Press, 1997),p. 64.
Happily Never After 
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