TV Violence Essay Research Paper

TV Violence Essay, Research Paper

“The relationship between violence on the screen and violence in real life is extremely complicated. But while the relationship may not be that of direct cause and effect, we must bear it in mind. Violent programmes may depress some people, shock others, de-sensitise some and encourage imitation by a few.”

(BBC Handbook-Guidelines for T.V Producers Regarding Violence and Censorship)

The media is all around us and for this reason I feel it is inevitable that it will have some sort of effect on us. Television is the most popular and accessible form of media; everybody has at least one television set in their home. It is also said to be the most vivid portrayer of the world. Screen violence is a term given to violence seen in television programmes, videos and cinema; basically any violence viewed on a screen. What causes a problem when debating screen violence is how we define and measure violence, as different people have different interpretations of what is violent. Some kinds of ‘violent’ activity are labelled as ‘violent’ others as ‘war heroism’.

Everybody interprets and responds to the media in different ways. The ‘hypodermic syringe’ or ‘effects’ model is a theory, which concentrates on the negative effects of the media i.e. what the media ‘does to us’. The power is believed to lie with the media and terms such as ‘the mass media’ or ‘mass communications’ are often used to emphasise the size and scale of media operations. It believes in a passive audience and highlights certain groups of people as being more vulnerable than others are. Children, people who are mentally ill, women, and the working class are the named groups because they are either obviously vulnerable (i.e. children and the mentally ill), or exposed to the media much more than other groups of people (i.e. women and the working class). I agree with this as far as children and the mentally ill are concerned because they have little control over what they are exposed to and are not selective viewers. However, the other groups mentioned are not as vulnerable, as they are able to decide for themselves what they watch and can create their own opinions about it. There are two key effects that this theory believes can be induced in an audience:

Inactivity- the couch potato

Manic activity- where the audience imitates what they have seen, i.e. copycat crime (often related to violence)

There are of course problems with this theory. It over-simplifies and assumes that everybody is passive and vulnerable to the media, which obviously is a generalisation, and isn’t true. Many experiments have been set up over the years, to try and prove or disprove such theories of audience engagement. One such experiment (which is now a much-criticised piece of research) was called the ‘Bobo doll experiment’, conducted by Bandura and Walters in 1963. It involved showing a group of children a film of adults acting violently towards a doll, and then leaving the children alone with the doll. The children were recorded acting in a similar way to what they had seen, which was said to prove that children copy what they see. The research was flawed in many ways. People (especially children) are often willing to please those conducting the experiments, and have a sense of what behaviour is expected of them. Also, a laboratory is a very different environment to the one in which we usually interact with the media.

The ‘uses and gratification’ model was founded in the USA in the 1940’s. It is one that disregards the pessimistic approach of the ‘hypodermic syringe’ theory, and instead focuses on the ‘active’ audience, an audience who is able to ‘use’ the media to its own advantage. The power here lies with the individual consumer, who is imagined as using the media to gratify certain needs and interests. In his book Media Analysis Techniques, Arthur Asa Berger provides a list of twenty-four things that the media may offer to do and what we as audiences may take from media products. The uses that I feel are relevant to this essay include:

1. To be amused

7. To find distraction and diversion

9. To experience, in a guilt-free and controlled situation, extreme conditions such as love and hate, the horrible and the terrible, and similar phenomena.

10. To find models to imitate

I feel that the last ‘use’ on the list above could have both positive and negative implications. Role models are useful as long as they are shown behaving in a positive manner. However, if a child saw Brad Pitt as a role model, and then watched a film such as Fight Club that contains very physical and violent scenes, he/she would think that if Brad Pitt is allowed to do it then it must be alright for them to do. Young children are not able to distinguish fiction from reality in the way that adults can. The problems with the ‘uses and gratifications’ theory is it suggests that everybody is capable of understanding what they watch, which is flattering to an audience; we are more likely to want to identify ourselves as active readers. However it ‘pigeonholes’ everyone into one group and totally ignores the obviously vulnerable groups such as children. It seems to forget that people come from different backgrounds, have different amounts of knowledge about things and live in very different social contexts.

“what we understand and be