The Violence in Media with Violence in Society

The relationship of Violence in media with violence in society is the complex issue, and the most fiercely debated concept among the people. However, there are many points that are interesting of the influences of media and its violence in the media which can lead to the violence in the society. Of course, the violence in media could not lead to the violence in the society as soon as it is shown. But when people are adapted to those violence behavior due to the addicted; usually seeing things which are violence over and over and their unconscious mind is automatically adapt the concepts and such kinds of behaviors.  

Consciously and Unconsciously people are trying to act like what they see, they like and their model who attracted, Influenced him or her.

To know more about the violence in media with violence in the society, we can look into some aspects which is categories below by some of the western psychologist and their research.

A.    Findings

Virtually since the dawn of television, parents, teachers, legislators, and mental health professionals have been concerned about the content of television programs and its impact, particularly on children. Of special concern has been the portrayal of violence, especially given psychologist Albert Bandura's work on social learning and the tendency of children to imitate what they see. As a result of 15 years of consistently disturbing findings about the violent content of children's programs, the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior was formed in 1969 to assess the impact of violence on the attitudes, values and behavior of viewers. The resulting Surgeon General's report and a follow-up report in 1982 by the National Institute of Mental Health identify these major effects of seeing violence on television:

·         Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others

·         Children may be more fearful of the world around them

·         Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others

Research by psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, Leonard Eron and others found that children who watched many hours of violence on television when they were in elementary school tended to also show a higher level of aggressive behavior when they became teenagers. By observing these youngsters into adulthood, Drs. Huesmann and Eron found that the ones who'd watched a lot of TV violence when they were eight years old were more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts as adults. Interestingly, being aggressive as a child did not predict watching more violent TV as a teenager, suggesting that TV watching may more often be a cause rather than a consequence of aggressive behavior.

Violent video games are a more recent phenomenon; therefore there is less research on their effects. However, research by psychologist Craig A. Anderson and others shows that playing violent video games can increase a person's aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life. In fact, a study by Dr. Anderson in 2000 suggests that violent video games may be more harmful than violent television and movies because they are interactive, very engrossing and require the player to identify with the aggressor.

Dr. Anderson and other researches are also looking into how violent music lyrics affect children and adults. In a 2003 study involving college students, Anderson found that songs with violent lyrics increased aggression related thoughts and emotions and this effect was directly related to the violent content of the lyrics. "One major conclusion from this and other research on violent entertainment media is that content matters," says Anderson. "This message is important for all consumers, but especially for parents of children and adolescents."

B.     Significance

A typical child in the U.S. watches 28 hours of TV weekly, seeing as many as 8,000 murders by the time he or she finishes elementary school at age 11, and worse, the killers are depicted as getting away with the murders 75% of the time while showing no remorse or accountability. Such TV violence socialization may make children immune to brutality and aggression, while others become fearful of living in such a dangerous society.

With the research clearly showing that watching violent TV programs can lead to aggressive behavior, The American Psychological Association passed a resolution in 1985 informing broadcasters and the public of the potential dangers that viewing violence on television can have for children. In 1992, the APA's Task Force on Television and Society published a report that further confirmed the link between TV violence and aggression.

C.    Practical Application

In 1990, Congress passed the Children's Television Act (CTA), which outlined new regulations for commercial broadcast stations. As a result of the CTA (which was updated in 1996), stations are required to air at least three hours of programming "that furthers the education and informational needs of children 16 years and under in any respect, including children's intellectual/cognitive or social/emotional needs." These programs must be labeled with the designation "E/I" and have clearly stated, written educational objectives. These educational programs generally contain both direct and indirect messages fostering cooperation and compassion rather than aggression. Parents now have positive options when it comes to choosing TV programs for their children. Research on television and violence has also led to the development of content-based rating systems that allow parents to make judgments about the programs' content before allowing their children to watch a show.

Besides warning of the harmful effects of violent media content, psychology has a strong history of bringing out the best in television. For example, Daniel R. Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, has worked with producers of children's programs like Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo to help TV shows educate children.

Apart from that we can also see the influence of media in many fields issues; likewise

(A) Media Violence as a Public Health Issue

On the other hand, many social scientists have concluded that there is a weak correlation between watching media violence and real life aggression—enough to convince organizations like the Canadian Pediatric Society and the American Medical Association that media violence is a public health issue. After all, governments don't wait for scientific certainty before they act to protect the public from smoking or drinking; all that's required is proof of a risk. If there is evidence that an activity or substance will increase the probability of negative effects, then the state is justified in intervening.

(B)  Media Violence as Artistic Expression

However, others maintain that the crusade against media violence is a form of censorship that, if successful, would seriously hamper artistic expression. Researchers R. Hodge and D. Tripp, for example, argue that, "Media violence is qualitatively different from real violence: it is a natural signifier of conflict and difference, and without representations of conflict, art of the past and present would be seriously impoverished."

Many commentators, from artists to film makers to historians, agree. Comic-book creator Gerard Jones contends that violent video games, movies, music and comic books enable people to pull themselves out of emotional traps, "integrating the scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into fuller sense of selfhood through fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction." Pullitzer-Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes says that video game violence enables young people to safely challenge their feelings of powerlessness.

Psychologist Melanie Moore concludes:

"Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of ourselves that we try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience vicariously through stories of others. Children need violent entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they've been taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more resilient selfhood."

(C) Media Violence as Free Speech

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression lists a number of reasons to protect media violence as a form of free expression:

·         censorship won't solve the root causes of violence in society

·         deciding what is "acceptable" content is necessarily a subjective exercise

·         many of the plays, books and films banned in the past are considered classics today

·         it's up to individuals and not governments to decide what's appropriate for themselves and their children

And, as the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) noted in its 1999 study of entertainment violence, media violence can be compelling social commentary. According to CMPA, the most violent film in 1999 was Saving Private Ryan, a fictionalized account of the D-Day invasion of Normandy which has been critically acclaimed for its realistic portrayal of the horrors of war.

Many media critics, like George Gerbner and Joanne Cantor, agree that censorship is not the answer. However, they question whose rights are protected when governments give, in Gerbner's words, a "virtual commercial monopoly over the public's airwaves," in effect delivering our "cultural environment to a marketing operation."

As journalist Scott Stossel notes, parents used to tell children scary stories face-to-face, so they could moderate the content and teach life lessons: "Children today, in contrast, grow up in a cultural environment that is designed to the specifications of a marketing strategy."

Shari Graydon, past president of Canada's Media Watch, and Québec activist René Caron remind us that the air waves are a public utility, and those who control their access and distribution must do so in ways that represent the best interests of all Canadians. Caron states, "violence has been used by the industry to capture the attention of boys, to captivate them and manipulate them." Although this strategy may be profitable, "from a social viewpoint, from a moral viewpoint, this approach has had abominable repercussions."

(D) Media Violence and The Uncivil Society

The repercussions aren't limited to a potential increase in aggressive behaviour. Many commentators worry that media violence has become embedded in the cultural environment; that, in some sense, it's part of the "psychic air" that children and young people constantly breathe. That environment of violence, profanity, crudeness, and meanness may erode civility in society by demeaning and displacing positive social values.

Todd Gitlin goes further. He argues that media violence is a red herring that allows politicians to divert attention away from very real social problems. He writes, "There is little political will for a war on poverty, guns, or family breakdown ... we are offered instead a crusade against media violence. This is largely a feel-good exercise, a moral panic substituting for practicality... It appeals to an American propensity that sociologist Philip Slater called the Toilet Assumption: once the appearance of a social problem is swept out of sight, so is the problem. And the crusade costs nothing."

Rather than focusing on violent content, Gitlin argues we should be condemning "trash on the grounds that it is stupid, wasteful, morally bankrupt: that it coarsens taste, that it shrivels the capacity to feel and know the whole of human experience."

(E)  Media Violence and the Inequitable Society

Gerbner warns that the search for a link between media violence and real life aggression is in itself a symptom of the problem itself. For Gerbner, media violence demonstrates power: "It shows one's place in the 'pecking order' that runs society."

For example, Gerbner's decades-long study of television violence indicates that villains are typically portrayed as poor, young, male members of visible minorities, and victims are overwhelmingly female. He argues that by making the world look like a dangerous place, especially for white people, the majority will be more willing to give the authorities greater power to enforce the status quo.

This is an argument that Michael Moore used in the award-winning movie, Bowling for Columbine. Journalist Thierry Jobin writes, "[Moore] denounces the way in which the government and the media foster a feeling of insecurity, pushing Americans to barricade themselves in their homes, a loaded 44 Magnum under their pillows." Gerbner worries that this sense of insecurity and powerlessness will be used to justify a weakening of democratic values.

(F)  Media Violence as Consumer Choice

Opponents of regulation argue that it's up to the viewer to decide what to watch. If you don't like television violence, they say, then turn off the TV. However, research indicates that the popularity of a TV show depends less on content and more on scheduling. As Gerbner points out, "... violence as such is not highly rated. That means it coasts on viewer inertia, not selection. Unlike other media use, viewing is a ritual; people watch by the clock and not by the program."

Joanne Cantor criticizes the media industry for saying it's up to parents, not the industry, to decide what their children watch: "They make harmful products, which come into our homes automatically through television, they market them to children too young to use them safely, and they try to keep parents in the dark about their effects." Cantor argues parents need tools to help them decide what is healthy and unhealthy for their kids.

One such tool is the V-chip, which enables parents to program their televisions with pre-set industry ratings to screen out certain shows. Keith Spicer, former chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, calls the V-chip a "sexy, telegenic little gizmo that fulfills the fantasy of a magic wand."

The industry has been quick to endorse V-chip technology but critics argue that its real function is to protect the industry from parents, not the other way around. Gerbner states, "It's like major polluters saying, 'We shall continue business as usual, but don't worry, we'll also sell you gas masks to 'protect your children' and have a 'free choice!' ... Programming needs to be diversified, not just 'rated.' A better government regulation is antitrust, which could create a level playing field, admitting new entries and a greater diversity of ownership, employment, and representation. That would reduce violence to its legitimate role and frequency."

(G) Media Violence and Active Audiences

Researchers like David Buckingham in the U.K. and Henry Jenkins in the U.S. add another dimension to the debate. They argue that rather than focusing on what media do to people, we should focus on what people do with media.

As Jenkins writes, media images "are not simple chemical agents like carcinogens that produce predictable results upon those who consume them. They are complex bundles of often contradictory meanings that can yield an enormous range of different responses from the people who consume them."

From this perspective, people don't just passively absorb messages transmitted through the media; they choose which media to consume and are actively involved in determining what the meaning of the messages will be. And that process doesn't occur in a social vacuum. Personal experiences affect what we watch and how we make sense of it. Our class position, our religious upbringing, our level of education, our family setting, and our peer groups all have a role to play in how we understand violent content.

Jenkins draws a different lesson from the shooting in Littleton: "Media images may have given [the Columbine shooters] symbols to express their rage and frustration, but the media did not create the rage or generate their alienation. What sparked the violence was not something they saw on the internet or on television, not some song lyric or some sequence from a movie, but things that really happened to them... If we want to do something about the problem, we are better off focusing our attention on negative social experiences and not the symbols we use to talk about those experiences."

In a nutshell, those categories above were the research which is done by many psychologists in the points of view of the psychiatrist. Actually, it is the inform choice which people are tried to follow; act like the particular behavior and tense to behave like the way they have seen and being influenced by the media; movies, films and cartoons. These kinds of unconscious mind adapted the mal-adjustment attitude and behavior. Therefore, the contribution of violence in media leads to the violence in the society.