Social Learning in the Media

   The press has exploited social learning as mainly being a bad thing, and usually uses it to blame just about any criminal situation with children and teenagers. Social learning in the media is basically the act of seeing something on TV or in a film and imitating it in real life. The media has been blamed heavily for influencing children to do horrible things, one of the biggest was the Columbine school shooting. People blamed violent TV, films, and video games for driving the kids to shoot up their school, whenever there was really no solid proof of this. The media has come under fire for influencing people to commit crimes, and just like the Columbine massacre, it is usually just a blame and there is no hard evidence. A great example that Professor Straubhaar gave was that the film "Juno" has made people think of teen pregnancy more lightly, and I found this interesting because it was a much more indirect influence on the viewer, because rather than them imitating something they saw in a film their social perspectives changed because of it.
   There have also been cases where the media's influence is reported and proved as the sole reason for certain events. For instance, a Scottish teenager and his friends repeatedly beat up a 15 year old kid in their school because he had an English accent, and they were shouting "Freedom!" while kicking him on the ground; it seems evident from this that the film "Braveheart" had an impact on why these kids decided to beat up an English boy. Many instances like this example have been reported, with them ranging from people imitating Beavis and Butthead and burning their house down to torturing a girl while quoting "Child's Play 3". There have been few positive instances of social learning, but one that I've always found fascinating is that a kid who was confronted by a deadly moose 'feigned death' and made the Moose thinking he was dead so it passed by; the kid learned this as a skill on World of Warcraft.
  

Links:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/electronic-publications/stay-free/archives/20/media_influence1.html
http://wow.joystiq.com/2007/12/05/boy-attacked-by-moose-feigns-death-thanks-wow/