Natural Born Killers :: essays papers

Natural Born KillersViolence is a constant on our screens whether it be an anvil falling ona cartoon character, a war z whiz on the news, a fight in an action movieor a pub brawl in a soap opera. But does this screen violence producebehavioural effects in the viewers? This is one of the most frequentand heatedly debated arguments in mass media. Is it the case that audiences are effected by what they see and that the producers of mediatexts are instigating or increasing violent behaviour, or do audienceshave the ability to understand what they have seen without being overly rund? It has to be ascertained as to whether audiences arepassive or active. This subject has caused contest within severalof different schools of thought and ideologies over the years. Theyhave either wide or only slight variations of opinion so it isdifficult to set to one definite conclusion as each one also has validand understandable explanations. It is difficult to deny that thewhole point of communicating is to influence one another by conveyinginformation (Vine, 1997), but to what extent does this influence takecontrol? To investigate this matter and come to a conclusion as towhether or not screen violence does instigate violent behaviour in thereader, we will be critically looking at two of the major(ip) ideologicalmodels as well as using some specific media texts to validate and/orcriticise these theories.First there is the Hypodermic Needle or Hypodermic Syringe effect. Thistheory has its root in 1950s America when dominant businesses and thethen government wanted to discover how far the public were influencedby what they maxim on television. The Hypodermic Theory came from thisMedia Effects model, which had a heavy emphasis in psychology.Businesses and the government alike wanted to know how much media issupposedly injected into the spirit of an audience viatelevision (Price, 1993). They wanted to know if through thisrelatively new medium the public could be persuaded unquesti oningly to,for example, vote for a certain political companionship or buy a specific brandof washing powder.The Hypodermic model proposes that the media has a very direct andextremely immediate effect on the general public, who accept theinjected message without question due to their passiveness. It is theidea that producers of media texts can persuade us to do what ever theywant and we will unquestionably comply. When we obtain the subject ofviolence into this field, a follower of this ideology would say thatthe violent behaviour witnessed on screen would be influentiallyaccepted by the audience without question.