In America’s daily consumption of media a strange trend has developed in the last couple years. It seems that whenever a real life tragedy occurs many news outlets and politicians tend to place the blame, not in the instigator of these violent acts, but instead in the media they consume which they believed made them this way. "I think there's a question as to whether he would have driven in his mother's car in the first place if he didn't have access to a weapon that he saw in video games that gave him a false sense of courage about what he could do that day." (Murphy) This quote taken from an 2013 debate on a bill to ban assault weapons gives us all the information we need. Violence in media and how it affects violence in real life is misrepresented …show more content…
Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern Calfornia and author of the book " Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth," does not agree with this opinion. She thinks that it would not take much skill to kill all those people, after all most of the people were shot at point blank range. (Benedetti) Sternheimer expresses in an interview that blaming video games is taking the easy way out. "Especially if you're talking about young males, the odds are pretty good that any young male in any context will have played video games at some point, I think in our search to find some kind of answer as to why this happened, the video game explanation seems easy," One more example wrongful blaming is the aforementioned Aurora Colorado shooting. This massacre occurred in Aurora Colorado on July Twentieth 2012 when, during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises a shooter opened fire in a crowded theatre killing twelve and injuring 58. (Pearson) In an interview with CNN criminal profiler Pat Brown made a statement saying that the video game the shooter played had a contributing part in the shooting. It seems that whenever we are scared about what is coming next we latch onto and blame the only thing that makes sense, and in this case it was the games this boy had played. (Ferguson …show more content…
One such study was done by Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey. They researched whether or not the amount of video games played impacted the criminality of an indivdual.
Savage and Yancey had noticed that while there had been numerous studies on whether video games increase aggression to their peers, no one had tested whether or not they affected criminal tendencies in teens and young adults. After exposing them to a violent television show, the kids were made to take a test to see if violent tendencies were displayed later. Once it was all said and done the results pointed to there not being any correlation with criminality and violent media consummation. (Savage, Yancey 16-17) The last reason that the representation of violent media is wrong is because, while video game and movie consumption is going up homicide rates are going down. As we see in the graph they follow each other for a little while but eventually go their separate
Also, newspapers focused on video games being the major explanation for school shootings. However, “Some stories mentioned other explanations… but these were treated mostly as minor factors compared with video games” (pg.14). Much less attention were given to the other reasons.
THESIS STATEMENT: The world’s media today seem to have more violence than ever. Video games have vivid depictions of accident catastrophes, fighting and murder. Television news programs generally lead with a violent story in order to gain an audience. This is free society people can stay what they want. ‘’ Media violence has many negative effect on youth today to commit crimes in society.’’
Hundreds of studies have been done to determine whether violent video games will really make juveniles more violent. Randomized experiments were used in several studies to examine the short-term effect of violent video games (Anderson and Berkowitz et al. 90). In these studies, children were randomly assigned to play violent or nonviolent video games and then were observed when given an opportunity to be aggressive. The result was that children who played violent video games usually behaved aggressively.
Parents around the world are blaming video games for their children's violence. Lets talk about that, firstly, you don’t see kids running around the world with guns pretending they're playing “Call of Duty” or anything. Yes there are school shootings once in a while, that doesn’t mean “Oh man, Video games are to blame” the number one cause of shootings is bullying or getting revenge on the bully himself.
As the level of violence in video games increases, so does the level of concern for those who play them. Some people are quick to blame school shootings on games just because the kid played a “violent” game. “The topic of videogames and violence can be compared to the chicken or the egg question, which came first, violent games or violent behavior”(Violence and Videogames). However most kids in mass shootings tend to have easy access to guns and are mentally unstable.
Since Columbine, in which two students carried out one of the most deadly school shootings in history. Video games, TV, and movies have been a sought-after target for acts of violence. After the Columbine shooting, the media thrust the idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s tendency for violent video games, not to mention screamo music and somewhat goth subculture, were partly to blame for the terrible day in history.
John Leo’s “When Life Imitates Video” is a persuasive work against violent media with children. Many of Leo’s points are first person with reaching correlations between violent media and life violence. Leo states that many of school shootings are related to video games. One of facts, he states is that because of shooters aiming for heads means they received that from videogames. Even if that was true, the way he states it may not have been the correct way. Leo’s stretch of the correlation between both real-life violence and media violence was unsupported. Leo’s work was supported by personal opinions on each issue at hand. If he could add statistic into the work, then he could have appealed with the ethos and pathos of the work. His major point to consider is that violent media is an opening for real life violence. As media violence creates a sense of violence being an acceptable thing in society, and it must be stopped at the source. While the need to stop violent media to prevent major massacres or school shootings is important, it’s also equally important to understand that it isn’t the only thing to create these incidents. Many factors contribute to these incidents for the future.
Can violent video games truly be a cause of real violence in our adolescents? Can they really lead to such terrible tragedies and massacres like the one at Columbine high school? That is exactly what writer John Leo is suggesting in his essay, “When Life Imitates Video.” He starts us off here by pointing out the similarities between the actions taken during the Littleton massacre and the events of video games like the two shooters often played; and he criticizes the plethora of shooting games available today and how realistic they are. These games that are played by so many today, Leo warns, could “blur the boundary between fantasy and reality.”
Before the 1999 Columbine tragedy, there was the 14-year-old boy in Paducah, Kentucky who, in 1997, went on a shooting spree at his local school. Parents of 3 of the shooting victims filed lawsuits against 25 media companies seeking $130 million in damages, citing that the shooter, Michael Carneal, learned how to shoot a gun by playing video and computer games. The lawsuits further implied that violent movies and internet pornography were to blame for the boy’s behavior (Holmstrom, par. 6).
The concept that the media and violent video games have an effect on aggression and violent behaviour in youth is one that I have heard speculations about in other classes and ultimately agree with. In the article by David Grossman, titled Trained To Kill, he presents the idea that while it is against human nature to kill one’s own kind violence in the media has led to an increase in criminal acts committed by youths (Grossman, 2000). Overall, I agree with his argument because the common theme of violence in media leads to desensitization, and creates a conditioned response to violent situations. However, since the 1980’s we have seen a decrease in homicides in Canada, which contradicts Grossman’s theory.
In Brad Bushman’s and Rowell Huesmann’s Article Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults from the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine journal, they believe the violent media in video games, tv shows, music, and movies, are affecting behavior in children and adults. Bushman and Huesmann believe that all the violence that has made a more popular appearance in today’s culture is causing for adults and children to be more prone to aggression. They hypothesized that the long-term effects would be greater in children and the short-term effects would be greater in adults, and discovered their hypotheses to be correct. Other articles, such as Beth Stein’s If Violent Video Games are Harmless Fun,
The influence of mass media has progressively increased in American society, but can the media have effects beyond mere entertainment and impartial information? American culture has become saturated with online news reports, social media, and media entertainment. Technology has become a major factor in America’s social environment. Much of the information gained from digital sources involves or portrays violence, and many social scientists have concluded that exposure to these portrayals may influence some individuals to behave violently. There is evidence that consistent exposure to violence can lead audience members to accept violence as normative, and adopt the behavior into their own lives (Surette, 2013, p. 393). However, researchers have also shown that the media is only one factor in behavior, and that it may not be the cause of violence (Black et al., 2016, p. 197). Other researchers support the theory that the benefit of using the media to fight violence outweighs any negative effect from it (Flexon, 2009, p. 608). Understanding violence is a complex, multi-faceted process, and all of these viewpoints must be acknowledged in order to understand the relationship between violent behavior in the media and violent behavior in individuals.
On average, an American encounters approximately 200,000 violent acts before the age of eighteen. However, these exposures do not influence an individual to exhibit violence. Concerns regarding whether television and video game brutality has a negative effect on the public by promoting cruelty, dates back to the 1950’s and is still prevalent today. Studies and research conducted on the issue are unable to prove that the two variables have any correlation to each other. In fact, statistics demonstrate how the amount of violent crimes has decreased significantly throughout time, despite the growing video game popularity. Lastly, in society, people look for anything to transfer the blame, especially in regards to a situation that may threaten an individual’s community. As a matter of fact, by reviewing the extensive research the conclusion was drawn stating, exposure has no effect on barbarity. Therefore, television and video game ferocity does not have a negative effect on the population.
Violence has been incorporated into the media over the past decades. Television, movies, and video games all depict violence in many different ways. The scary truth is that shootings, especially in schools, are occurring more often than they should. Individuals are wondering what influenced young men like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to go into a school and shoot innocent people; these two young men were the Columbine High School shooters. People are also wanting to know why young men like these two are going into schools and other public places with the mindset of killing as many people as possible. Although, there are many factors that influenced these people, media violence is a key component of them. Violence in the media negatively affects an individual’s behavior.
In the book Critique of Violence ,author Walter describes Violence as "The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, male development, or deprivation .The violence that is portrayed in the media has been debated for decades ,and it has rose a question about how does it influence the youth?. From movies to video games society has been accustom to seeing violence in their everyday entertainment. Since children are easy to be influence by their environment, it is safe to say that violence in the media can and will contribute to violent behavior.