Natural Born Killers :: essays papers

Natural Born Killers madness is a constant on our cover versions whether it be an anvil falling ona cartoon character, a war zone on the news, a fight in an action movieor a bar brawl in a soap opera. But does this privateness hysteria producebehavioural effects in the viewers? This is one of the close to frequentand heatedly debated arguments in mass media. Is it the case thataudiences are effect by what they see and that the producers of mediatexts are instigating or increasing violent behaviour, or do audiences fork out the ability to understand what they have seen without being alsoinfluenced? It has to be as indisputableed as to whether audiences arepassive or active. This field of operation has caused controversy within s of all timealof 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 conclusion as each(prenominal) one also has validand understandable explan ations. It is difficult to deny that the unharmed point of communicating is to influence one another by transferinformation (Vine, 1997), but to what extent does this influence takecontrol? To investigate this motion 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 ideologicalmodels as well as using some specific media texts to validate and/orcriticise these theories.First there is the hypodermic Needle or Hypodermic Syringe effect. Thistheory has its root in 1950s America when dominant businesses and the and so government wanted to discover how far the public were influencedby what they adage on television. The Hypodermic Theory came from thisMedia Effects model, which had a heavy dialect in psychology.Businesses and the government alike wanted to know how much media issupposedly injected into the consciousness of an audience viatelevision (Price, 1993). They wanted to kn ow if through thisrelatively new medium the public could be persuaded un school principalingly to,for example, vote for a certain political party or buy a specific shuffleof washing powder.The Hypodermic model proposes that the media has a very direct and exceedingly immediate effect on the general public, who accept theinjected message without question due to their passiveness. It is theidea that producers of media texts can 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 say thatthe violent behaviour witnessed on screen would be influentiallyaccepted by the audience without question.