Introduction
Media have a tremendous influence on family life. Consider that 99 percent of U.S. homes have a television. Ninety-eight percent have radios, and 69 percent have computers. Just sixty years ago the invention of the television was viewed as a technological curiosity with small black and white ghost-like figures on a screen so hardly anyone could see them. Today that curiosity has become a constant companion to many, mainly – children. From reporting the news and persuading us to buy certain products, to providing programs that represent violence, television has all but replaced material. So what is the problem of violence nowadays? Can it cause a real damage? Or maybe the violence in media is just a figment?
Reasons for choosing this topic
• There are more and more incidents of violence shown on TVs.
• People extort money by placing bombs in airplanes, rape, steal, murder and commit numerous other shootings and assaults. Where some of such fantasies came from?
• Over 1000 case studies have proven that media violence can have negative affects on children.
Hypotheses
Before starting to work some hypotheses were raised.
Violence is used in many ways in promos as a hook to draw viewers into the program. That is because violence is an effective promotional device. But severe permanent damage could be done to the children’s minds by such pornographic and sadistic material, in which detail is powerfully realistic.
There is a connection between media violence and aggression. Media encourage people to cause criminals.
Between 2000 BC and 44 AD, the ancient Egyptians entertained themselves with plays re-enacting the murder of their god Osiris – and the spectacle, history tells us, led to a number of copycat killings. The ancient Romans were given to lethal spectator sports as well, and in 380 BC Saint Augustine lamented that his society was addicted to gladiator games and “drunk with the fascination of bloodshed”.
Violence has always played a role in entertainment. But there’s growing consensus that, in recent years, something about media violence has changed.
For one thing, there’s more of it. Laval University professors Guy Paquette and Jacques de Guise studied six major television networks over a seven-year period. They examined films, situation comedies, dramatic series, and children’s programming (though not cartoons). The study found that during these years, incidents of physical violence increased by 378 per cent. TV shows in 2001 averaged 40 acts of violence per hour.
Other research indicates that media violence has not just increased in quantity; it has also become more graphic, much more sexual, and much more sadistic.
Explicit pictures of slow-motion bullets exploding from people’s chests, and dead bodies surrounded by pools of blood, are now common fare. Millions of viewers worldwide, many of them children, watch female World Wrestling Entertainment. Wrestlers try to tear out each other’s hair and rip off each other’s clothing. And one of the top-selling video games in the world, “Grand Theft Auto”, is programmed so players can beat prostitutes to death with baseball bats after having sex with them.
Concerns about media violence have grown as television and movies have acquired a global audience. When UNESCO surveyed children in 23 countries around the world in 1998, it discovered that 91 per cent of children had a television in their home. And not just in the U.S., Canada and Europe, but also in the Arab states, Latin America, Asia and Africa. More than half (51 per cent) of boys living in war zones and high-crime areas choose action heroes as role models, ahead of any other images, 88 per cent of the children surveyed could identify the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from the film “Terminator”. UNESCO reported that the “Terminator” „seems to represent the characteristics that children think are necessary to cope with difficult situations.“
The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), which has studied violence in television, movies and music videos for a decade, reports that nearly half of all violence is committed by the „good guys.“ Less than 10 per cent of the TV shows, movies and music videos that were analyzed contextualized the violence or explored its human consequences. The violence was simply presented as justifiable, natural and inevitable – the most obvious way to solve the problem.