The media and the body: what the young people have to say?

The aim of this article is to verify the perception of the young about the relation between the media, especially the TV and magazine access and the body of the adolescent. It is a cross-section study carried out with 121 adolescents of a private school in Sao Paulo. A semi-structured individual interview was applied and recorded in magnetic ribbon using the methodology of the discourse of the collective subject based in the concept of social representation. The data were tabulated using three methodological approaches: central idea; key expressions and discourse of the collective subjective. The discourses of adolescents were evaluated, indicating that 95% of central ideas expressed relations among TV, magazines and the body and the most common ideas were about the stimulation of the thinness ideal physicist and the negative influence with hazard experience and illnesses appear. In 5% of central ideas registered no relation among TV, magazines and the body. We could conclude that young people show the knowledge about the intense media's interference in the adolescent body.