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 peerless on the news, a fight in an exercise movieor a pub brawl in a soap opera. But does this screen violence producebehavioural effect in the viewers? This is one of the most frequentand heatedly debated arguments in mass media. Is it the case thataudiences be effected by what they see and that the producers of mediatexts are instigating or increasing rampageous behaviour, or do audienceshave the major power to understand what they have seen without being overly mouldd? It has to be ascertained as to whether audiences arepassive or active. This subject has caused controversy within several(prenominal)of different schools of thought and ideologies over the years. Theyhave either wide or only slight variations of opinion so it isdifficult to come to one definite completion as each one also has validand understandable explanations. It is difficult to deny that thewhole point of communicating is to find out 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 ideological gets as well as victimisation some specific media texts to validate and/orcriticise these theories.First there is the Hypodermic Needle or Hypodermic Syringe effect. Thistheory has its settle down in 1950s America when dominant businesses and thethen government valued to light upon how far the public were influencedby what they saw on television. The Hypodermic opening came from thisMedia Effects model, which had a heavy emphasis in psychology.Businesses and the government identical wanted to know how much media issupposedly injected into the consciousness of an audience viatelevision (Price, 1993). They wanted to know if through this relatively new medium the public could be persuaded unquestioningly to,for example, vote for a certain political party 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 backside persuade us to do what ever theywant and we will unquestionably comply. When we bring the subject ofviolence into this field, a follower of this ideology would advance thatthe violent behaviour witnessed on screen would be influentially real by the audience without question.