Media Violence

Entertainment companies are always using 2 things to attract viewers, firstly is obviously sexy girls and the second is VIOLENCE. It is proven that television and gaming violence can influence young kid to try out what they see or play.

According to University of Michigan professor L. Rowell Huesmann, argue that fifty years of evidence show "that exposure to media violence causes children to behave more aggressively and affects them as adults years later."

This is issue have been discussed for a long time. A lot of parents and social community argued that the media is to blame for all the violence in the world today. Movie and game producers don't care about the content as long as the their product sells, they will use whatever content to make it sellable.

Violence in the media can be defined in to types; whether in acts such as killing, fighting and gang rape or verbally abusing people using vulgar language or sexually abusing. There is a thin line in the connection between media violence and aggression.

The ever so famous Scarface, Tony Montana played by Al-Pacino as a famous mafia.

For example movies like scarface, 300, the hills have eyes and many more. These movies are mostly blockbuster films. Scarface have been a hit since the 1980's. Many believe that this violent movies are the cause of the increase of crimes because people are young people are becoming more aggressive.

This movie is banned in certain countries because of violent scenes and sensitive issues

And as for video games, kids tend to play violent games. They like to hold guns and just kill everyone they see. It's fun in their point of view. Games like Postal 2, The House of Dead, Resident Evil and many more. Even Scarface is made into a video game.

There are a lot of research being done to conclude this issue. Much of research has been guided by social learning theory developed by Albert Bandura. Social learning theory suggests that one way in which human beings learn is by the process of modeling.

In criminology, Ronald Akers and Robert Burgess (1966) developed social learning theory to explain deviancy by combining variables which encouraged delinquency (e.g. the social pressure from delinquent peers) with variables that discouraged delinquency (e.g. the parental response to discovering delinquency in their children).

Social learning theory is compatible with a variety of other theories of aggression and a diversity of research methods, For instance, neurophysiological theory and research.

So until today there is no conclusive answer to this issue. But users and parents do have the choice whether they want to follow what they see. They should know what is right and what is wrong.

References:

media-awareness.com, 2007, 'Media Violence', viewed 4 November 2007;[internet],http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/index.cfm

media-awareness.com, 2007, 'Research on the effects of Media Violence', viewed 4 November 2007;[internet], http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/effects_media_violence.cfm

Wikipedia.com, Akers, Ronald L. (1973), 'Deviant Behavior: A Social Learning Approach',viewed 4 November 2007;[internet], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_theory