Media Violence Essay

“There is increasing evidence that early exposure to media violence is a contributing factor to the development of aggression” (Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski, & Eron, 2003). Huesmann and Kirwil (2007, p. 545), argue that an individual’s aggression and violent behaviour are not only caused by emotional, mental and physical circumstances but also the environment plays an equally vital role. They further on state that hastening violent behaviour in the short-term sense is due to disclosure to violence, which can be either through media, computer games and violence that they observe at home, school and their social environment. This paper intends to comprehend media violence and its effects on humanity by understanding the issues that underlie the argument of whether the exposure of violence through the media does in fact contribute to ones likeliness to engage in violent and/or aggressive behaviour. In this essay, an evaluation will be made to determine the length of the effects of violent media in children and adults. Secondly an analysis will be made in terms of the conditioning that one experienced growing up, formerly a brief explanation of interpretation will be made and finally a conclusion will be made to determine whether exposure to media violence does indeed cause violent and/or aggressive behaviour in individuals.

Many say that violence is not learned from mock violence, but is learned from the real-life encounters we have with violence, starting with the whipping of kids by their parents when they are younger, or by peers for instance.

Conditioning, is a “behavioural process whereby a response becomes more frequent or more predictable in a given environment as a result of reinforcement, with reinforcement typically be...

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...children have an instinctive tendency to imitate whomever they witness, however that still does not mean that they can. Besides that, do the kids that are playing these games really know the difference between fantasy and reality? Numerous do not, and use these video games as a “dress rehearsal for the real thing”.

Let’s face it, the Medias agenda for televising, or creating these ‘violent portrays’ was not to cause uproar in the violent fragments of people, their intention was simply for recreational purposes. How a person decides to interpret the information, is entirely their doing as said before. So if parents do not monitor their children’s media intake, they could just as much end up like one of the thousands of criminals sent to penitentiaries and on death row for mindless and avoidable acts of violence. After all they did not say ‘grab a gun and shoot’.