Saturation of Visual Media: Spectacle of Terror - Essay Example

?Saturation of Visual Media Spectacle – The Spectacle of Terror The first element of power in the present world is media. The important point of consideration at this juncture is that media violence has been creating various problems in everyday life. The consequences of visual media, especially on children and young people have been an issue for debate even since the very introduction of mass media. Evidently, violence in the media negatively influences children and adolescents. Thus it calls for greater self-regulation and social consideration from the part of media people. Fiske (1989, p.127) says that represented violence is admired and accepted as it provides the people with points of significance in societies where the power and resources are unevenly dispersed and structured around lines of contradictory interests. Now a day, violence on television has become concrete representation of class conflict in the society. The easy accessibility to the media technology helped quickly revealing many significant events across the country. For instance, the police trial and consequent unrest in Los Angeles, the Rodney King beating, and the 9/11, together with the alarming revelation of the country’s vulnerability towards international terrorist attacks. The media has become an integral part of the real and essential assemblies of various social institutions like, hospitals, schools, political, administrative and military systems, even in religions. The media has the power to lead gathering and transmitting news, advertising, conducting campaigns. In the same way, there is a widely accepted belief that “those who make the headlines have the power.” Moreover, the media plays significant role for successfully conducting and executing wars, educational programs, entertainment, and socialization. The influences the media have on such social enterprises are legitimate points for evaluating the impacts of saturation too. Even though the general individual homicide rates in U.S. have been steady for many years, there is an increase in the number of school-aged children towards homicidal attitudes. Since 1980s, there have been a sudden rise in the gun-related homicides among the teens and several publicized murders have taken place in schools making the issue too complicated to handle. The violence among youth is attributed to the permutation of various factors, which impede their emotional ad social developments. Obviously, visual media has played a great role in creating such drastic situation. Today, visual media has become an invasive element of American family life, and symbolic violence illustrated in such medium has become a significant social issue. Therefore, such obvious revelation underlines the question of media’s ability to form awareness and attitude within the mass, especially the youth. We find it too hard to form counterbalancing factors to the violent death themes exemplified by the media. Moreover, the ability to discrete between fantasy and reality is very less in the children, adversely affecting them by creating misconception of death in their mind. Hence, consequences are getting enlarged in an age of media modernization, expansion, and saturation. When the media content is in progress with technology and culture, it influences the method in which reality is comprehended. The modern perceptive and assessment of violence at the hands of government representatives and terrorists are customized and memorized by the present media technologies. In the same way, visual media often undergoes a phenomenon called “disaster marathons,” days and weeks of intense and continuous media coverage of massive tragedies such as, the 9/11 and its aftermath. In the opinion of Fischoff (2005), it creates all kind of possible destructive consequences on viewers and on journalists’ ethics due to the emotionally saturated over coverage of these traumatizing events. Undoubtedly, the media passes on entertainment and related diversions to all segments of people. The foremost audio-visual medium that delivers entertainment is television or films. According to Fischoff (2005), today, the world is witnessing the ethnocentric protectionism and Fundamentalist outrage at American cultural export through its films and television programs. Thus, many consider television as a window into a wider world at the same time helping to skip away from discovering the proficiency essential for succeeding in life. Moreover, many researchers have found out that people are offended by the way how their class is depicted in film and that different classes of people take offense at different depiction and illustrations. For instance, many movies portray Black criminals just how some Asian movies depict minority as criminals. Fischoff (2005) argues that Muslims are offended so much by the continuous media stereotyping them as profligates, brutish, and violent, which got even worse after the 9/11. With the widespread of technology and media, viewing visual media has become an ordinary routine within a viewer society. However, the media do not imitate and symbolize the reality of the public instead constructs and utilizes it as stimulus to rationalize their own long-term existence. In the view of Merrin (2005, p.25), news feedback function as a tool to confirm itself and to convince us that someone is watching the news and it is an important stuff, and that public are politically interested and mobilized. There is no doubt that the media can cause violence in the people who are exposed to it. In fact, the violent media is the primary element that contributes to the youth violence in our society. American media have been influencing the minds of the innocent and vulnerable, flooding them with negative and violent messages. Their video games have created a negative impact on the people about the culture and society of the country. The saturation of media has changed the perspective of people looking at the world relate to violence and death. There is no doubt at all that higher levels of viewing violence on television are directly connected with increased approval of violent attitudes and increased destructive behavior. Disclosure to violence in the mass media, particularly at young ages, can have dangerous permanent consequences and creates a pessimistic attitude within in the person. Such person always looks at the world only in terms of violence and death. We can say that the 9/11 was a significant media event that instantaneously covered the whole event. Regarding the hyperbole media played on event of 9/11, Merrin (2005) writes, “despite the audience’s extension into the heart of the event – the real-time montage of close-ups, long shots, multiple angles and ground images, edited and replayed and mixed with commentary, speculation, political reaction, and the apprehension, an adrenalin of the live moment” were depicted. He adds that with the electronic experience, no event was happening for them and so they hyper realized the real and de-actualized and deterred it. How drastic the actual incidents of 9/11 might be, for the media industry, the whole incident was of a semiotic alteration and illustration as visual media demonstration for family consumption in the comfort and security of the living room. Through her researches, Brigitte Nacos (88, 2006) has illustrated that after the 9/11, “heavy news consumers were more plagued by fear of terrorism than those who did not follow the news very closely” (COT, 2008, p.25). The attention to terror through the media has a greater implication on the way how the audience distinguishes terrorist threats and attacks. During the September 11 incidents, the TV gaze allowed the creation of a context-free account about American victims of a completely unanticipated foreign violence. The media demonstration of September 11 created critical public opinion among the society, creating compassion, anger, terror and the pursuit for vengeance in the minds of the people. Such impacts of the media coverage created a situation where people found it reasonable to justify the political and military reactions to the event. If the 9/11 had not happened, some of the politicians and technocrats would have been finding themselves still with the unachieved legal and technical actions. On the other hand, fright and anger, the two major influential weapons formed as consequences of the visual media spectacle helped in formulating the course of policy. The majority of people who watched the whole incident through the television had their consciousness incised not just with death and destruction but also with anger and indignation. The images of 9/11 travelled even long after the incident through magazines, newspapers, books, and as repackaged documentaries across the world. There have been an exceptional number of web-hits identified with the September 11 and its followings. Through the movies, the incidents of 9/11 became a major event offering the viewers with various perspectives on the terror attacks. Most of them were emphasizing on the American victimhood while those made outside the country, created an anti-American perspective. Thus, the visual media has a great potential to influence the individual’s idea of reality. Wass (2003) reflects that high levels of violence exposed in entertainment media present a means for understanding death and grief, but is more of a gross distortion of the demographic facts. Moreover, the adults and children of our society would be made media savvy. In the words of Lyon (2006), there exists an unspoken theory that technological solutions are appropriate, and that they work, though it did not work out in the 9/11 morning. The awareness, called media literacy, is of great significance which involves an understanding of how the media can shape us psychologically, cognitively, and in attitude. It also involves the methods to protect us against their messages in order to preserve an informed, biasfree society. References COT: Institute for Safety, Security and Crisis Management 2008, ‘Terrorism and the media’, Transnational Terrorism, Security & the Rule of Law, pp.1-94, Viewed 05 November, 2011, Fischoff, S 2005, ‘Media psychology: A personal essay in definition and purview’, pp.1-21. Viewed 05 November, 2011, Fiske, J 1989, Understanding Popular Culture, Routledge, New York. Lyon, D 2006, 9/11, Synopticon, and Scopophilia: Watching and Being Watched, KD, Haggerty & RV, Ericson (Eds), The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, University of Toronto Press, Canada. Merrin, W 2005, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press, UK. Wass, H 2003, ‘Children and media violence’, Business Library. Viewed 05 November, 2011. Read More