The Analysis

‘’Growing Up With The Media’’ by P.G. Aldrich

‘’Growing up with the Media’’ is an essay where P.G. Aldrich investigates the influence of Mass media. As the essay a text has peculiar structure and can be divided into three logical parts.

In the introduction an author sets the scene by describing the most vivid memories of childhood. All of them are connected to TV in particular and Mass media in general.

Then goes a statement of a problem where P.G. Aldrich claims that media has become a very influential part of men’s life. He says that people accept the media just as they accept the house they live in, cars, electricity, telephones, school and their family as part of their environment.

The Body contains advantages and disadvantages of living in the times of media’s reign. Thus, the author makes mention of psychological impact the media has, its control over people’s will and uncritical perception of harmful information.

Beside the negative influence of media, positive one is also investigated. According to P.G. Aldrich the positive aspects of growing up with the media are immediate access to all kinds of information, socialization and possibility of communicating across the globe, and advertising as a tool of discovering something new.

In the conclusion the author makes the restatement by telling that information no matter what quality it has is percepted by people unconsciously. Some of the media’s output has long lasting value and worth; some is not only cheap, tawdry, and superficial stuff, but physically, emotionally, and intellectually harmful. This message can be called the idea of the text.

Further analysis allowed us to distinguish various stylistic devices such as simile, repetition, enumeration, parallel construction, metaphor, metonymy, rhetorical questions, ellipsis, capitalization, italization.

‘’Accept the media just as part of your environment’’, ‘’as you grew, you absorbed uncritically, as children do’’, etc are similes presented in the...