Television Violence - The Root Cause or A Scapegoat



Television Violence - The Root Cause or A Scapegoat

Introduction

This essay would be used to determine whether television is the most prominent tool for promoting violence. According to research violence in television commercials, movies or dramas can have seriously adverse impact on the neurological state of a child.

There are two models which could help us analyze whether aggressive behaviors executed by a child is due to media violence or biological reasoning. It is quiet evident through the process of social learning model that a child forms most of his features from his social environment and only few through inheritance. By on the contrary the opposing model of social learning model which is the catharsis framework which suggests that aggression is primarily being driven from biological factors that are dependent upon expression (Lorenz, 1963).

According to the suggestions of this model, violence depicted through media results in providing an outlet or releasing aggressive instincts. Hence such people who actively consume media violence would expected to be less aggressive as consuming violent media allows them to release their anger by providing them with a distraction which would allow them to forget about factors making them angry or aggressive.

Whether adults exposed to the high amount of intense mediums could develop the characteristics of a sadistic person, aggression or a violent person would be determined with the help of few logical reasoning and arguments.

Discussion

According to majority researchers the children who are majorly exposed to violence in media are impacted in several ways. These influences include the mean world syndrome, adverse neurological effects, desensitization effect and aggressor effect (Gerbner1980) Mean world syndrome is a phenomenon where a child assumes that he is getting victimized by others and develops a sense of mistrust. This syndrome causes them to believe that the world is a dangerous place. These children also tend to think that there is no solving a problem or issue without the use of violence. They are influenced to think this way due to the superhero movies or cartoons that they watch.

The second type of adverse impact on children could occur in the form of desensitization. Joanne Cantor (2002) suggest that desensitizing effect incurs when a response which is emotional in nature is constantly elicited, and the tendency of an action is linked with

the emotions proving to be irrelevant.

For example, a boy of the age of six in Florida was fighting with a friend in his apartment. The fight resulted in the boy managing to take his friend to the balcony and pushing him across the railing causing his friend to die.. However during the questioning of the boy he seemed very indifferent to the fact that he had just killed his friend (Cantor, 2001).

Social learning theory is the biggest supporter of the causal relationship between violence in media and aggression in a child as it suggests that exposure to any content leading children to replay this media context when they feel that ...