Mass media

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Mass media
The paper basically focuses on whether the television programming that contains violence and aggressive content make us a more violent and aggressive society
From the various researches that have been carried out concerning violent television and films, music and video games, it has been established that media violence has the potential of increasing the likelihood of violent behavior and aggressiveness in both the long term and immediate contexts (Anderson et al.81). In addition to that, the impact of the violent media on the adolescents and children have been a subject of discussion since the introduction of media thus involving a complex of interplay of politics, commercial interest, public advocacy and policies. The federal agencies and the U.S. Congress probed by child advocacy groups and professional organizations, have often claimed that violence in the entertainment media have resulted to the negative impacts on children thus making them call for more social responsibility and self-regulation by media industries. These media industries especially the television, has always responded through criticizing various number of studies in which the claims were based by disputing their findings and interpretations hence pointing out to their amendment rights. However some authors argue that the youth violence is a complex problem that has been caused by many interactive factors such as domestic violence, poor monitoring, inappropriate or inadequate patterns of communication that all result as a result of ineffective parenting. Other factors that contribute to youth violence are such as drug use, racism peer pressure, peer rejection, poverty and violence in the various cultures. Due to the above mentioned, it has been proved difficult to determine these factors impact on promoting aggressiveness and violent behaviors as parents have been considered as the main prominent and potent force in their children`s social and emotional development.
Anderson et al views media violence as a serious threat to the health of the public as it stimulates violence behavior among the youths (85). Most researchers by the early 1990s had already arrived at a conclusion that the significance of media violence on violent behavior and aggressiveness was causal, significance and real.
Many educators, providers and parents have become more concerned on the amount of television and programming types to which the children are often being exposed ("American Academy of Pediatrics" 425).Young children especially those under the age of two years on averagely spend two hours every day watching screen media or television. Therefore the American Academy of Pediatrics gives advice that the children under the age of two should not watch television as studies show that too much of television viewing can have harmful effects to the small children. For example children may develop attention difficulties, have some delays in language and the development of smaller vocabularies and also develop more aggressive and violent behavior and play. The media telecommunications have also become a feature that is pervasive in the American family lives and thus acting as a powerful driving force in the child`s cultural upbringing and socialization. As a result of this, violence has been symbolically recognized as a social pressing issue. From the survey that was conducted, it was established that nearly all the American families have a television set and majority of them have video game equipment and computers. More than half of the children from the survey that was carried out, had television sets in their bedrooms thus making them to spend more than four and half hours a day just viewing some form of video screen half of the time being in television. This extensive exposure underscores media`s power to shape attitudes and perceptions among the young children and the adolescents ("Children and media"1).According to scholars analysis, nearly one and half of films displayed on the television often depict extreme acts of violence thus having a great impact on the viewers.
From the early days of television, majority of the people have been concerned about the likely negative effects of the television program on aggressive or violent behaviors (Eyal and Rubin 77).One of the research direction was to discover or investigate people`s perception s of the attributes they encounter on the various programs they watch on the television. Researchers have established that, the effects that are often encountered when viewing television content that are violent arte not uniform but are basically based on the observers` characteristic such as the disposition to behave aggressively. These aggressive dispositions often develop over time and are always stable across various situations and time thus the existing tendencies of predicting serious adult antisocial behavior. Other situational factors also contributes to the aggressive response such as environmental background, familial background and observational learning conditions often interact with aggressive tendencies to influence the possibility of a response that is aggressive. Generally researchers have found evidence for the observation that more aggressive people are often influenced by the media violence exposure while on the other hand those who are not aggressive in nature may find themselves being influenced by the existing violence in media however the magnitude of the effects may differ across the two groups of people. For example, the violence portrayed in the media may train non-aggressive viewers` attitudes that are aggressive or on the other hand reinforce the existing characters that are already aggressive in nature. However media violence can be instrumental in bringing about behaviors that are pro-social an outcome that is non-aggressive.
According to Freedman (5), social cognitive theory was developed on the basis of social learning theory which was interested in observational learning and its limitation as it applies to social behavior and its early focus was on aggressive behavior. Therefore he pointed out that a theory of human aggression should try and explain the questions concerning how aggressive patterns are formed and what provokes people to act in an aggressive manner and finally what is it that sustains aggressive behavior in the societies we live. Freedman noted that there exist correlation between how people interact personally, environmental determinants and behaviors that defines the acquisition of aggressive tendencies (10). The social learning theory was based on various assumptions. The first assumption was that aggression has to be learned, while the second assumption points out that learning aggressive action often occur vicariously via observing a model which can be a televised media, movie film just to menti...