Does Violence in the Media Cause Violence in the Audience - Coursework Example

DOES VIOLENCE IN THE MEDIA CAUSE VIOLENCE IN THE AUDIENCE? By 25 February Does Violence in the Media Cause Violence in the Audience? Introduction The links between violence on the screen and violence in the audience have already become a matter of the major scholarly concern. Professionals and scholars in psychology/ sociology/ and related studies seek to determine and evaluate the impact, which media violence produces on different population groups. A mountain of research has been performed to confirm that media violence causes detrimental effects on the psychology and behaviors in children and adults, who expose themselves to television. Society tends to believe that violence on the screen is the source of the serious negative impacts on the quality of society’s wellbeing and can be directly responsible for the raise of aggressiveness and violence in individuals and groups. This paper aims to reveal the existing controversies about the role, which media violence plays in the development of the audience’s aggressive behaviors. This work does not try to confirm the link between media violence and audience’s violent behaviors. Rather, the goal of this paper is to prove that the current body of scientific evidence is at least scarce to position media violence as a source of aggression in the audience. Theories and research findings will be used to either deny the direct impact of media violence on the audience, or to suggest the existence and relevance of factors other than media violence, which may cause violence desensitization in the audience and thus result in more violent responses to media exposure. This paper is expected to confirm the need for further analysis with regard to the effects of violent media on the audience. Media violence and violence in the audience: the existing controversies That society is being increasingly concerned about the impact of violent media on children and adults is difficult to deny: the growing wealth of literature on the topic confirms the need for investigating the specific forms of influence, which media produce on different population groups. It is even more important to define, whether violent media can be considered as the direct prerequisite for the development of aggressive behaviors in children and adults. Until present, the studies of media violence have been focused around the variety of topics and have resulted in the development of several important conceptualizations of the link between media and aggressive behaviors in the audience. In the middle of the 1930s, when cinema and movie industry were gradually turning into a popular form of leisure, several scholars, including Blumer and Dale came to conclude that media messages and violence on the screen were directly responsible for the development of real-life aggression in viewers: those who participated in Blumer’s experiments, “were conscious of the fact that they had directly imitated acts of violence that they had witnessed in violent movies” (Sparks, Sparks & Sparks 2008). Blumer’s findings were later followed by a whole sequence of similar researches, which confirmed the link between media violence and real-life aggression in the audience. For example, Liebert and Baron (1972) “indicated that children exposed to an aggressive program were likely to display and engage in longer attacks against an ostensible child victim than those, who watched nonaggressive programs” (Liebert and Baron, 1972). In the same way, Philo (1999) showed that most children in the research identified cool people with killer in violent movies, whole those who were killed were seen as uncool and weak. The subsequent popularization of these studies has led society to believe in the detrimental effect of media violence on the audience. Violent media today are recognized as the basic sources of aggressiveness and violent behaviors in individuals. Unfortunately, the link between media violence and violence in the audience is seriously underresearched. Moreover, the growing wealth of literature about negative effects of violent media on the audience produces “the worrying influence” on the public understanding of media effects on the audience and does not leave any room for objectivity (Gauntlett 2001). In reality, the number of researches that deny or at least do not confirm the relevance of the media violence effects on the audience greatly exceeds the number of those, which link media violence to crime or aggressiveness. Whenever the link between media violence and aggressiveness in the audience comes into play, researchers tend to underestimate or neglect the potential impact of other, related factors, on the development of violent reactions in individuals. What seems to be the result of the continuous exposure to violent media can also be the result of other multiple influences, including various subjective and objective features of the audience. Objectively, the scope of the violent media influence on the development of aggressive behavioral reactions in the audience depends on a multitude of factors. The contiguity theory of imitative learning can become the starting point in the analysis of violent media influence on the audience: proposed and used by Bandura (1965), this form of conceptualizing the media-aggressiveness links suggests that the mere exposure to modeling stimuli (in this case, violent media) does not create sufficient conditions for the development of imitative behaviors (in this case, aggressiveness). Bandura (1965) was probably one of the first to emphasize the relevance of factors other than modeling stimuli, which could be potentially responsible for the development of matching responses in individuals. For example, Citak (2009) sought to evaluate the role of attitudes toward violence on television and confirmed the growing role of those attitudes in constructing individual responses to violent media exposure. Citak (2009) writes that media plays a significant role in constructing attitudes toward violence in the audience, meaning that the quality and the form of violent media itself may produce different impacts on viewers. Simultaneously, the process of moral evolution in individuals may be of great importance in producing and mediating the effects of violent media on the audience (Citak 2009). Finally, the process of moral evolution itself can be heavily influenced by a whole set of objective and subjective categories, from age and gender to parental activity and peer support. All these factors can either reinforce or minimize the impact of violent media on the audience, especially youth. Cooper and Tang (2009) are confident that “no single theoretical construct explains the complexities that determine exposure to television. Individual motivations (ritualistic and instrumental), use of newer media, age, and traditional structural factors, all played a significant role in explaining overall exposure to television” (Cooper and Tang , 2009) . As such, it is at least incorrect to say that violent media exposure invariably results in the development of aggressive/ violent behavioral reactions in the audience. To a large extent, the current understanding of the link between violent media and aggressiveness is still in the state of its infancy, and there is an urgent need to define and evaluate the specific impact of every single factor on the quality of behavioral responses to media violence. Ferguson et al (2008) investigated a number of factors that could be responsible for violence and crime in younger adults – exposure to television and video game violence were not significant predictors of violent crime. Although continuous exposure to violence is believed to cause the so-called desensitization to violent stimuli (Fanti et al, 2009), it is too early to say that violent media exposure alone is responsible for these desensitization symptoms. Sparks, Sparks and Sparks (2008) are correct, when saying that media violence may be just one out of many different causes of aggression in the audience, and because “other” causes of violence lack empirical research or are yet unknown to the scientific majority, the assertion that violent media are responsible for real-life aggressiveness in the audience distorts the reality. The current state of research does not have the body of scientific evidence necessary to confirm that media violence is responsible for the development of violent behavioral reactions in the audience. It would be fair to assume that years will pass, before researchers have sufficient evidence to confirm or deny the relevance of the direct link between media violence and aggressive behaviors in the audience. Conclusion The link between violent media and aggressive behaviors in the audience has already become matter of the major scholarly concern. Researchers and scholars in sociology/ psychology/ and related studies seek to confirm the negative impact of violent media on behavioral reactions in the audience. The current state of research favors and reinforces the belief that continuous exposure to violent media is the direct prerequisite for the development of aggressive behaviors in viewers. However, the current state of research also lacks the body of evidence necessary to confirm the relevance of violent media exposure in the development of the audience’s aggressive behaviors. It would be fair to assume that a whole multitude of factors is responsible for and contributes to the development of aggressive behaviors in individuals and groups. As such, years will pass before researchers can confirm or deny the existence of the direct link between violent media and aggressiveness in the audience. References Bandura, A 1965, ‘Influence of models’ reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 1, no. 6, pp. 589-595. Citak, GG 2009, ‘Constructing an attitude scale: Attitudes toward violence on televisions’, International Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 268-273. Cooper, R & Tang, T 2009, ‘Predicting audience exposure to television in today’s media environment: an empirical integration of active audience and structural theories’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 400-418. Fanti, KA, Vanman, E, Henrich, CC & Avraamides, MN 2009, ‘Desensitization to media violence over a short period of time’, Aggressive Behavior, vol. 35, pp. 179-187. Ferguson, CJ, Cruz, AM, Martinez, D, Rueda, S & Ferguson, DE 2008, ‘Personality, parental, and media influences on aggressive personality and violent crime in young adults’, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 395-413. Gauntlett, D 2001, ‘The worrying influence of media effects studies’, In Barker, M & J Petley, Ill Effects: The media/ violence debate, New York: Routledge, p. 47. Liebert, RM & Baron, RA 1972, ‘Some immediate effects of televised violence on children’s behavior’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 469-475. Philo, G 1999, ‘Children and film/ video/ TV violence’, in G Philo, Message received: Glasgow media group research, Addison-Wesley. Sparks, GG, Sparks, CW & Sparks, EA 2008, ‘Media violence’, in J Bryant & MB Oliver, Media effects: Advances in theory and research, Taylor & Francis, p. 269. Read More