Why do people blame the media for everything? I’m sick of bozo parents complaining about how there’s too much “violene in the media.” I’m sick of anorexic waifs who refuse to accept that their own lack of self esteem causes them to slowly kill themselves. “The media tells me I have to be thin.” I’m sick of brain-dead bible-thumpers who insist that every nutcase out there is crazy because of video games and porn mags.
Clue: There were crazy people long before video games, porn mags, and Jackie Chan movies.
I’m sick of smelly neohippies who insist that The Media doesn’t give enough attention to their “cause” because it’s not in their best interest.
Clue: The best interest of the media is what people want to see. If people wanted to see it, it would be on television.
I’m sick of people who go around complaining that The Media keeps trying to define how they are, but they’re not gonna buy it, they’re independant and anti-conformist, now get out of my way so I can go get my Rachel haircut.
Clue: The Media mirros society. NOT the other way around. Everything it has ever told you is exactly what you wanted to hear.
well friedo, this is where the post ended up, so why not let’s debate some. i must first warn you that i agree with you a lot. but there are a few minor differences. i will now fight you virtual tooth and nail over these petty differences. game on, baby.
>I’m sick of people who go around complaining that The Media keeps trying to define how they are, but they’re not gonna buy it, they’re independant and anti-conformist, now get out of my way so I can go get my Rachel haircut.
yeah. most of these people annoy me, mainly because they are ‘independent and anti-conformist’ only because the tv or whatever said it was cool. but then again, there is a big difference (let’s eschew the rachel-do cuz it will not support my argument, and say the example is hair bleaching) between wanting the hairdo because it’s looks good or cool buying into the media stereotypes that go with the hairdo.
>The Media mirros society. NOT the other way around.
This one i actually disagree with the most. i hate it when politicians blame movies and cd’s for violence. and i hate it when neo-tarantinos etc state that what they are putting out has no impact on society. Any art, even bad art, is meant to impact society in a certain way, and it uses society as a groundwork or reference for its message. True, the media mirrors society, but society is also shaped by the media.
>Everything [the media] has ever told you is exactly what you wanted to hear.
again, not true. the media says many things, but the most common thing is ‘buy my (or their) shit’. i don’t want to be told that i am a hard worker and deserve a big mac. and i especially never wanted to hear bob dole waxing eloquent about his erectile troubles.
basically, the people blame the media because it’s the easiest and most obvious target. but the world is a complex place, and there is certainly enough blame to go round.
Are you counting media and art as the exact same thing? If so, are video games an art? I don’t believe that the creators of Doom were trying to influence society in the same way an artist does. They were creating a fun game, with the ultimate goal of: (brace yourself)
Cash.
I’m just as furious as you when politicians blame media (especially video games) for violence. Kids aren’t going to start shooting other people because they made Duke Nukem do it half an hour before. Duke Nukem was created because humans have a natural tendency towards violence, as we have had for the last million years, and will continue to have until the last human on Earth attacks the mirror just because he feels like it. If there was no violent tendency, you’d be seeing a lot more Pokemon games, so count your blessings. I agree with the OP, the media mirrors society.
All I have to say is (quoting the TV behind me), “I may have genital herpes, but I will ** not ** let it get me down”.
Ok, I also have to say that the media are a bunch of evil, plastic scum-suckers–but they don’t make people do things (though they can help things along the way) and they are just responding to the ratings.
When I say media I mean it in the the sense of informing, i.e, when I say I lame the media Im typically refering to the News and News papers.
They in my opinion do a lousy job at informing the public of anything meaningful going on in the world. You’ll remember it was the media (ok and the repubs themselves) that claimed Bush was the president in waiting, screw what those McCain supporters thought.
Most of my evening new goes something like this:
Fire, Car accident, robbery, (especialy if there’s video footage) Pres said , repubs responded, sports & weather.
Not Covered:
What passed in Congress/Senate (unless it’s really a devisive issue)today
What Company screwed over workers/consumers/enviornment today
Latest pol caught lying through their teeth today(unless pres or significan repub)
I second jb_farley’s comment on this earlier. Society is undoubtedly influenced by the media.
I would like to add that it is also not true that the media mirrors society. “Dog bites man” mirrors society. “Man bites dog” does not. The media presents the unusual. This has the impact of making many negative aspects of society seem more common than they actually are.
But if the OP is limited to “Why do people blame the media for everything?”, I heartily agree. Not everything.
Furthermore, it would be silly to deny the effectiveness of advertising; companies wouldn’t be spending hindreds of millions a year on advertising if it didn’t make any difference. Most of the buying choices we make are influenced by advertising, and thus the media. It can’t be a coincedence that the products that sell the most happen to bethe ones that are advertised enough.
I will also reply with another Onion headline:
“Lysterine invents, cures Halitosis”
THe media is certainly capable of altering our perceptions to sell us products; sometimes those altered preceptions last longer than the product in question.
The media certainly can have some small influence on people but I think that the influence is severely limited and based around the individual code of morality which someone exposed to some form of media might have. What I mean is that a media text (like a violent film) cannot force people to do something which they think is amoral unless they’re a few cards short of a full deck.
I think that people who go up in court and plead guilty to some violent crime saying:
“Oh it couldn’t have been MY fault, I watched Pulp Fiction yesterday, it influenced me to do all those bad things”
are either very, VERY ill or just full of shit. Think about it like this; As soon as we learn to talk our parents, guardians or whoever try to impress upon us a moral code, we are conditioned to believe above all else that murder is the ultimate sin, for example. Now I think that years parents impressing this onto their kids is going to have a lot more influence over them than Reservoir Dogs or whatever. The same is true of video games. Politicians piss me off when they say that violent games can influence kids more than other stuff because kids physically interact with computer games. In my opinion that is absolute bullshit. If that were true then Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers or pretend the pretend war games which all kids play would influence them because, after all, the kids are interacting with their pretend scenarios. Like I said, bullshit.
However, I think as regards advertising that people can be subtly influenced as they are only being persuaded to buy stuff, not to hurt somebody. Since the messages in adverts don’t go against our moral codes we can be influenced by them slightly, perhaps made slightly more incluned to buy this brand of coffee rather than that one, but that’s about as far as it goes.
This is very simplistic. Of course a completely moral or non-violent person will not suddenly be transformed by weatching a movie, or playing a computer game. However, years of watching movies and playing games make these a part of the environment that a person lives in. To deny the impact of these on a person is to the deny the influence of environment on a person - an untenable position to take.
I don’t deny that a person’s environment can affect them but your environment is real, it is your world. A film is not. When I say that people who have any sense of right and wrong cannot be influenced by a film I say it safe in the belief that the vast, vast majority of people are able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Violent movies may not be partcularly edifying entertainment but they are entertainment none the less.
Of course violent media will become a part of someone’s environment if they like violent films, games etc… However I don’t think that people will be influenced by them to do bad things.
The two main theores surrounding effects of media violence on audiences are the Hypodermic model and the Inoculation model. The first model states that people are injected (figuratively speaking) with the message carried by the last media text they saw and they carry that message around with them until they see/hear something which contradicts it at which point they start believing that one.
This model assumes that people are merely human sponges which absorb everything they see and hear without thinking about it, without passing any sort of moral judgement on it and without criticising it. This is plainly not true yet this hypodermic theory regularly surfaces in the diatribe of pro-censorship activists.
The second model is the inoculation effect. This is the theory to which I ascribe which states that people become desensitised to violence the more they experience it. However I would like to stress that desensitisation to violence does NOT make a person treat violence in a more offhand manner, rather it reiterates to the viewer that what they are watching is only a movie.
I brought this up because it is my belief that even though someone may immerse themselves in violent games, books, music and films they will not affect him negatively because he is being desensitised to it.
I will just state again that I do recognise the fact that a person’s environment will affect them but violent media is an aspect of their enviornment which will have a negligable effect on the vast majority of the population.
I’m not familiar with the first of the two “models” that you describe, and never heard it brought up in any diatribes. But I concur with you that it sounds completely idiotic, to the point that I’m convinced that if indeed it is actually a serious school of thought held by intelligent people, there must be more to it then you are letting on.
But I’m inclined to disagree with you about the second one.
In any event, it goes beyond desensitizing. I am quite sure that if the majority of TV shows and movies were about Amish families, a large percentage of news about Amish goings on etc., there would be a definite change in the culture towards the direction of being more like the Amish.
Of course, there is a reason why this is not currently the case - people are not all that interested in the Amish. However, there is a part of us that is attracted to the seamier side of life. The problem is that it is not the best part of us. By having our environment more closely mirror this aspact of ourselves, we strengthen our worst inclinations.
What are you guys talking about? The media has a HUGE influence on people. One of the big reasons that public opinion turned on the Vietnam War was because of unrestricted media access. If the media didn’t have an effect do you think the pentagon would have agents in major news organizations making up stories? NO! They would just let the media go and report, knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. The media influences presidental campaigns, wars, societies morals.
I’m not saying that it causes normal people to turn into homicidal maniacs, but it can certainly turn people into killers. People sign up for wars based on Media information. As soldiers they can kill people.
You are referring to factual information being wrong or slanted, causing people make wrong decisions. “You guys” are referring to the culture presented by the media changing people’s character and morals.
To be honest, the hypodermic effect IS very simplistic. It is not really held up by the majority of intelligent people or behavioural scientists. It is a theory which has been adopted by pro-censorship groups because of it’s simplicity and you don’t need any working knowledge of the media to be able to understand it. It is, in my opinion, a good theory for convincing people of the dangers of the media but it isn’t really good for much else. The hypodermic model assumes that the audience is passive, in other words it just takes what is thrown at it without thinking about it. The Inoculation model assumes the audience is active, which means that they think about what they’re watching and pass judgements on it.
I think you make a good point when you say:
However, even if a person delved deeper, and deeper into his darker side I still don’t believe it would incite him to commit crime. A person’s own moral values, plus a fear of getting caught would stop them from taking it to the next level.
I’d just like to focus on violent movies for a moment. Whenever people talk about media violence they dwell on violent movies presumably because they think that cinema is a more far reaching medium than, for example, violent computer games. In England there was a case about ten years ago when a small boy was killed by two older boys (both 10 years old). The country was, understandably, in shock and violent movies ended up vicariously taking the blame for the two boys actions. I just brought this up because I wanted to inlcude a quote from a British newspaper by a man called David Alton, who was researching movie violence at the time.
He said:
I cut that article out of the newspaper and have had it since. I just wanted to inlcude that quote because his views have been echoed in various other pro-censorship writings I have read and in some cases, seemed to be the core of their argument.
I am frankly puzzled by this attitude. Surely movies have a strong sense of right and wrong. Morality nearly always triumphs in the end, even in explicitly violent films. A good example of this is Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial masterpiece “A Clockwork Orange.” In this film a highly violent youth has his free will robbed from him by the government so that he could not commit a violent act. When his free will is restored at the end of the film his return to his old, more violent, lifestyle is a triumph for free will, the films explicit violence is counteracted by an ending in which the value of free will is emphasised above all else. I would consider this to be a positive message.
In short, a person delving deeper into the darker side of his nature through the watching of violent films will be exposed to morality as well as violence.
BTW - Having studied media for four years and focused extensively on this topic, I am relieved to find somewhere I can have an intelligent discussion about it. It’s the first one I’ve had on the subject and frankly it’s not a moment too soon.
To be honest, the hypodermic effect IS very simplistic. It is not really held up by the majority of intelligent people or behavioural scientists. It is a theory which has been adopted by pro-censorship groups because of it’s simplicity and you don’t need any working knowledge of the media to be able to understand it. It is, in my opinion, a good theory for convincing people of the dangers of the media but it isn’t really good for much else. The hypodermic model assumes that the audience is passive, in other words it just takes what is thrown at it without thinking about it. The Inoculation model assumes the audience is active, which means that they think about what they’re watching and
pass judgements on it.
I think you make a good point when you say:
However, even if a person delved deeper, and deeper into his darker side I still don’t believe it would incite him to commit crime. A person’s own moral values, plus a fear of getting caught would stop them from taking it to the next level.
I’d just like to focus on violent movies for a moment. Whenever people talk about media violence they dwell on violent movies presumably because they think that cinema is a more far reaching medium than, for example, violent computer games. In England there was a case about ten years ago when a small boy was killed by two older boys (both 10 years old). The country was, understandably, in shock and violent movies ended up vicariously taking the blame for the two boys actions. I just brought this up because I wanted to inlcude a quote from a British newspaper by a man called David Alton, who was researching movie violence at the time.
He said:
I cut that article out of the newspaper and have had it since. I just wanted to inlcude that quote because his views have been echoed in various other pro-censorship writings I have read and in some cases, seemed to be the core of their argument.
I am frankly puzzled by this attitude. Surely movies have a strong sense of right and wrong. Morality nearly always triumphs in the end, even in explicitly violent films. A good example of this is Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial masterpiece “A Clockwork Orange.” In this film a highly violent youth has his free will robbed from him by the government so that he could not commit a violent act. When his free will is restored at the end of the film his return to his old, more violent, lifestyle is a triumph for free will, the films explicit violence is counteracted by an ending in which the value of free will is emphasised above all else. I would consider this to be a positive message.
In short, a person delving deeper into the darker side of his nature through the watching of violent films will be exposed to morality as well as violence.
BTW - Having studied media for four years and focused extensively on this topic, I am relieved to find somewhere I can have an intelligent discussion about it. It’s the first one I’ve had on the subject and frankly it’s not a moment too soon.