Linking Media Violence to Real World Aggression

There is a substantial increase in the global attention devoted to violence prevention and to the responses of civil society organisations. For example, the World Health Assembly adopted in 1996 a resolution that declared violence a major global public health issue and called for increased action (Krug et al 2002).

An American site dedicated to providing guides for studies in criminal justice identifies 8 horror movies inspired real life crimes. The site claims that Natural Born Killers was associated with several serial killers and Scream and its popular ghost mask was behind the murder of a woman by her teenage son and nephew. The violent movie A Clockwork Orange was banned from UK cinemas because it was evident how the level of violent crimes has increased following its release, with many cases that exhibited twisted similarities with the film (Criminal Justice Degrees Guide online).

Naturally, such claims raise a serious matter considering how and whether crimes and aggressive behaviours are connected to and provoked by media violence. Correlations or coincidental relationships as noted do not establish causal relationships between the “reel” and the “real” violence.

Psychologists’ studies and scientific evidence integrated in qualitative and quantitative reviews came to the same conclusion: viewing violence increases aggression. On the other hand, the entertainment industry denies the findings and claims that the reflection exists but the other way around and that the media exhibits an image of the existing violence in society (Bushman & Anderson 2001). This claim is supported by the advocates of the “no-effect” hypothesis, as they agreed that the effect of media violence is negligible (Van der Voort, p.325).

Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman were advocates of the link between exposure to media violence and the increased aggression in real world. They presented many comprehensive studies that examined various aspects with thorough quantitative researches. They concluded that violent media teaches observers how to be aggressive, that it primes them and puts them in an aggressive state. It contributes on the long term, to forms viewing strategies that consider aggression as acceptable in conflicts, by changing five knowledge structures: beliefs and attitudes, perceptions, expectations, behaviour scripts and degrees of desensitisation (Anderson & Bushman 2001, p.355).

An impressive amount of research was dedicated to this topic and put forward several theoretical frameworks diverging in many directions without reaching any certainty. Ideas were sometimes focused on one aspect but neglected other significant ones. Theorists of the desensitising aspect researched media, based on this one aspect of Anderson and Bushman’s research. Their empirical researches compared the level of sympathy in subjects of the study before and after they were exposed to media violence, to conclude that such exposure makes people numb to real life violence (Sparks 2012, p.107). Other accounts considered the psychosocial perspective to explain the opposite behaviours of viewers in selecting television programs and movies based on their rating, or the individual differences of the exposure to violence and its influence (Kiewitz and Weaver 2001).

The world report on violence considered the multiple factors that could form a climate which encourages violence and grouped them into 5 different levels: the broadly external social level, the community context, the relationship level and the individual specific biological and personal level. Considering that the effect of media violence is just one factor out of many others in the social context, and adding the other 4 levels of causes according to the mentioned report, it becomes clear why the studies concerned with the influence of media violence didn’t reach a common conclusion.

References:

Anderson, C. & Bushman, B. September 2001, Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature, Psychological Science (Wiley-Blackwell), vol. 12, no. 5, p. 353, retrieved May 8, 2014 from Business Source Complete.

Bushman, B.J. & Anderson, C.A. June/July 2001, Media Violence and the American Public: Scientific Facts Versus Media Misinformation, American Psychologist, vol. 56, no. 6-7, pp. 477-489, retrieved May 7, 2014 from Business Source Complete.

Bushman, B, & Anderson, C, 2009, Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others, Psychological Science (Wiley-Blackwell), 20, 3, pp. 273-277, retrieved May 7, 2014 from Business Source Complete.

Criminal Justice Degrees Guide, 8 Horror Movies That Inspired Real-Life Crimes, viewed May 5, 2014, <http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/features/8-horror-movies-that-inspired-real-life-crimes.html&gt;.

Kiewitz, Christian & Weaver, James B. III 15 October 2001, Trait aggressiveness, media violence, and perceptions of interpersonal conflict, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 31, Issue 6, Pages 821-835, retrieved May 5, 2014 from Science Direct.

Krug, E. G., Mercy, J. A., Dahlberg, L. L., & Zwi, A. B. 2002, The world report on violence and health, The Lancet, vol. 360, no.9339, Retrieved May 8, 214 from ProQuest.

Sparks, Glenn Jan 1, 2012, Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview, Cengage Learning, UK.

Van der Voort, T. H. A. Aug 31, 2009, TELEVISION VIOLENCE: A child’s eye view, Elsevier, USA.

What does this photo tell you?

A picture is a worth a thousand words

The immediacy of photographic images makes it possible to condense and simplify meanings for immediate access to a wide audience. Nevertheless they are snippets of a much complex background, the foreground of the depicted event that works great on emphasizing emotions and morality but not in conveying deep and sustained analysis.

The headlines of published articles and the photos, out of the many elements that make up news stories, are the first to reach the audience and form a general position about its reception of the news. With the ease of access to news and information in a digital world, we are exposed to too much information and so many news images. People tend to scan the articles rather than do in-depth reading and with images. The reporting media attempt any possible misinterpretation of photos with the use of captions. By trying to frame the images or anchor their meanings, it implies the thoughts that will presumably come across the readers and the viewers of the photos before they even read the details.

The Syrian Civil War has countless news stories, claims and accounts about the violence and brutality exercised between the activists and the Syrian army, and for which accuracy remains unverified. It’s a war zone where news are reported to the world from one of those two different angles. The implied audience is the global world that should be informed and aware of the plight of innocent people in this non ending war.

Photos in the tragic context of Syrian Civil War are used for best conveying the brutality exercised against civilians and mostly innocent women and children. The reporting media assumes that the audience has compassion and concerns for the suffering of the Syrian people, that it will certainly condemn the acts of civil war and seek the intervention of big nations to stop the killing.

The picture of the man holding the sign could be a familiar one. It was taken from a silent march of Syrians living in Beirut, as a way to express their anger not just for the attack that killed innocent children, but also on the silent world towards the crimes that are being committed in Syria. They were few words with the intention to move the world and appeal to people’s consciences, in a way urging them to act for once and stop passively looking at the photos.

From a social semiotic approach, news photographs direct us to assess the image and the caption as two integrated references, but the separately they are interchangeable. The person holding the sign is preventing this isolation of the photo and the text. By holding up the words, there is an attempt to cut through the usual distraction resulting from an image, with words that drives the viewer to repulse his/her position as a spectator, who derives pleasure out of others’ suffering, and act with the power of his/her freedom in this world.

Semiological interpretation of images

It is clear that the many interpretations of a sign result from a reciprocal action between the individual being the decoder and the different meanings offered by the sign itself. The image on its own has broader polysemy which could be narrowed down with the use of captions and textual references.

Reading Barthes’ concept of the semiological myth and in particular his analysis of the cover photo of Paris-Match, made me think in particular about the process in choosing cover photos in magazines and how tough would this task be considering the prominent place of this particular photo in selling the publication. I suppose that a photograph on the front page that gives way to many interpretations might be mostly undesirable.

The link below is for an article from New York Times online “The Delicate Handling of Images of War” that treats this topic in the specific context of war. The assistant manager editor in charge of photography shares her experience in choosing photos with rather an emotional impact and the delicate process involved in that choice.

Digital Forgery

I always come across the popular photograph below often captioned “How the media can manipulate our viewpoint” showing a middle eastern soldier held at gunpoint while being given water with an army canteen.

The picture is self-explanatory as it points to the different interpretations of the same photograph as a result of a simple crop separately taking out the pointed gun or the water canteen.

We know how easily digital photography editing makes tampering with photos as simple as a click of a mouse, yet the change is enough to bring out extremely different subjective views.

I believe it is a necessity that media regulatory bodies force approaches that promotes high standards and codes of ethics in visual media is necessary to avoid such means of manipulation.

Media Cobweb

It is unfortunate that the Australian law on the media underwent major changes which released the restrictions that were in place on cross-media ownership. This was what set the grounds for this growing trend of media control, moving towards a global form that includes newspapers, TV stations, publications, magazines and publishing houses labeled ‘global media empires’.

Ricardo Goncalves provides detailed facts in his online article about the Australian Media ownership which he describes as “a tangled media web”(SBS online)

It seems that that the snowball is still rolling with News Limited making an offer for another deal that would expand Murdoch’s ownership to Fox Sports and give him control of FOXTEL with Telstra

Mass Communications Media

Today’s social media is a practical example of the bottom up theory which pictures the media as a business supplying the exact demands as determined by the market or the audience.
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn are some of many social media platforms engaging individuals in providing and exchanging the information, adopting by this the bottom-up model of mass communication. When people are virtually meeting through those media societies their interactions spontaneously produce and consume some sort of customised information marked with freedom and creativity to a certain extent.
On the other hand, a typical top down approach in mass communication would be a centralised method that imposes rules and norms on the media and consequently on news and information that influence the audience in the owner’s interests.
One would expect this vision to be extinct in modern societies of evident democracies. Such control over the published news seems unrealistic in a world where social media promotes means for the public to use and exchange information in multi-directional communication, with hardly any restrictions or norms on sharing or reproducing it.
However, a very recent article published on the 9th of december 2013 in the British Daily Mail online proves such method is exerted on the heavily regulated Russian media.
Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a decree that dissolved the main state news agency “RIA Novosti”, and created “Rossiya Segodnya” or Russia Today.
The article clearly illustrates in words and pictures the image of a “dominant” leader, Putin. The images showing protests against his regime are from media archives as it seems this public reaction has faded little by little since Putin was re-elected in 2011. It is not surprising this has been managed when the state has such tight control over mass communications media.
Interestingly, I have visited WorldTruth.Tv, a website created by one person in september 2011 and suggests it offers news, documentaries and other information that are not found in the mainstream media. This is a one-man work that is said to be dedicated to informing people about the concealed truth, while expressing views that are 100% produced by their owner. Regardless of the size and importance of the owner, and setting aside possible moral objectives behind this work, I see it as another channel of mass communication adopting the top down approach.

I am sharing below this caricature taken from an article published on Robert Amsterdam online in 2007 about Putin’s control over the internet.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520839/Vladimir-Putin-closes-news-agency-RIA-Novosti-tightens-control-Russian-media.html
http://robertamsterdam.com/2007/03/putin_tightens_control_over_internet/

Shannon and Weaver theory is a simplistic model that ignores many components of the communication process. It was derived from the basic understanding of the term “communication”; being plainly the process of transmitting some thoughts or information from a sender to a receiver through a channel. In other words, the successful communication means the message is conveyed exactly as it is.
However, Shannon and Weaver do recognise that the receiver of information has a choice or many choices of information. This notion of the “freedom of choice” seems to put more depth in their plain conception.
How do we establish our choices? Aren’t choices the result of certain criteria such as social or cultural factors?

From this point of view my thoughts are that the plainly scientific theory of Shannon and Weaver could meet with many more elaborated theories of communication.