The Impact of Media Violence

Media Violence and its negative impact has been discussed and debated for many years As children grow into teens they encounter as vast amount of violence in the media, negatively impacting today’s youth. Teenagers who are exposed to media violence will fail to develop effective socialization strategies and resort more readily to violence, which makes society a more dangerous place.

Through social contact, individuals learn to think and act in certain ways, this type of learning is called socialization. One of the most influential agents of socialization is mass media. Children spend an average of four hours in front of a television each day, and with each passing hour, they witness between twenty and twenty-five aggressive acts (Ferrante; Phillips).With all the negative media embedded into their lives, children have no other choice than to absorb it, learning how to think and act based on what they see on television. After viewing over eighty violent acts within those four hours, children are conditioned to be violent. As they grow older, they stop focusing on their education and employment, and instead measure their success with how much trouble they get into. They begin to get into fights, act out in their schools and neighborhoods, and even get involved with other crimes such as theft and vandalism, simply because that is what they have been exposed to all their lives. Psychologist, Leonard Eron supports this, believing that ten percent of violent crimes in the United States are caused by exposure to media violence (Easterbrook). In fact, in 1960 Eron conducted an experiment tracking video violence and actual violence for almost four decades. He confirmed that even occasional violence showed in television shows causes incre...

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... industry who market the notion that mass murder is fun, and they feel privileged to make violence even more accepting. Firearms are portrayed as “glamorous, all-powerful devices”, so adolescents are more willing to use guns because they have been taught that killing is acceptable and even cool (Easterbrook). At such a young age, children should be fearful of weapons, and should stray from violence, instead they come to find it normal, they see killing for pleasure as a common event. Many times children take these things and act upon them, they themselves become violent simply because it is the one thing they can rely on and look back to. Maybe if children did not start gaming or watching violent television at such a young age, they would understand the difference between illusion and reality, but instead they perception is warped because they don’t know any better.