Media Violence vs. Real Violence

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Television is the source of the most broadly shared images and messages in history; it is the mainstream of the common symbolic environment into which children are born and which has a major part to play in our lives. One can argue that media violence contribute towards social violence where the effects place a huge impact in ones being. Television violence is not only a form of media violence; there are other significant forms of media that contribute to media violence which are computer games, comic books and music. In this essay I will compare the theoretical perspectives and methodologies of at least three different approaches to the study of the effects of media violence and how effective they are in establishing a link between ‘Media Violence’ and ‘Real Violence’.

Violence is part of everyday life which the media reflects on. One can argue and say that violence in the media reflects on the society we live in, however violence has been around even before the existence of the media, it could be argued that the media might not be the root of the escalating violence in society but with studies and studies of effect the argument could be wrong. There have been numerous cases with media violence being repeated in real violence, the case of James Bulger can be a prime example, where two ten-year old boys, John Venables and Bobby Thompson led James away from his mother while she was not looking in a shopping centre, the boys had brutally abused James which eventually led to his death. Although the event was shocking, leaving people in disbelieve and confused of how the children could be influenced to doing such, looking at their family history/background is essential as it could have triggered their behaviour. It was said that ...

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...ent programmes were observed to be more aggressive in social relations with their peers, whilst the behavior of those watching violent programmes was unaffected. However, whilst some commentators have found this findings plausible( noble, 1975), it has been strongly argued more recently that result was due to the fact that many boys in the groups confined to non-violent programmes, and that it was the frustration caused by this which led to the increase in aggression (Milavsky, Kessler, Stripp & Rubens, 1982a; 4; Freedman, 1984:230); followers of batman, for example were particularly annoyed, to the extent that the experimenters were eventually forced to allow them to watch it.

Survey studies involves questionnaires which may respondent to estimate how much tv they watch or to state their favorite programmes that are then classifieds in terms of violent content.

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