Unit 5: Media Violence

1. Mass Media Effects on Violent Behaviour

This section examines the relationship between media consumption (television, films, video games, social media) and aggressive thoughts, emotions, or behaviors in audiences.

A. Theoretical Frameworks

Sociologists and psychologists have developed several key theories to explain how media violence impacts the individual and society.

1. Social Learning Theory (Albert Bandura)

• Core Concept: Individuals learn behavior by observing and imitating others, particularly if the model is rewarded for the behavior.
• The Bobo Doll Experiment (1961): Demonstrated that children who watched an adult behave aggressively toward a doll were likely to imitate that aggression.
• Relevance: Suggests that "heroic violence" in media (where the good guy uses violence to solve problems and is praised) effectively teaches aggressive conflict resolution.

2. Cultivation Theory (George Gerbner)

• Core Concept: Heavy exposure to media (specifically television) shapes the viewer's perception of reality to match the media world.
• Mean World Syndrome: Heavy consumers of violent media perceive the world as more dangerous and threatening than it actually is. This leads to increased anxiety, fear, and support for authoritarian policing measures rather than direct aggression.
• Mainstreaming: Diverse groups of heavy viewers begin to share similar, media-influenced viewpoints.

3. Priming Theory

• Core Concept: Media violence stimulates other aggressive thoughts and feelings stored in memory.
• Mechanism: Watching a violent act activates a neural network of related concepts. For a short period after viewing, a person is "primed" to interpret ambiguous situations as hostile (Hostile Attribution Bias).

4. Desensitization

• Core Concept: Repeated exposure to violence reduces the emotional and physiological response to real-world violence.
• Impact: Reduced empathy for victims and a higher tolerance for aggressive behavior in society.

5. The Catharsis Hypothesis (Feshbach)

• Core Concept: A counter-argument suggesting that viewing violence allows individuals to purge their own aggressive tendencies in a harmless way.
• Sociological Consensus: This theory is largely unsupported by modern empirical data; most studies show exposure increases rather than decreases aggression.

B. Types of Media Effects

1. Behavioral: Imitation, physical aggression, verbal abuse.
2. Affective (Emotional): Fear, anxiety, desensitization, lack of empathy.
3. Cognitive: Changes in beliefs about the prevalence of violence or the effectiveness of violence as a problem-solving tool.

2. Online Harassment

Online harassment refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to engage in repeated hostile behavior intended to inflict harm on others.

A. The Online Disinhibition Effect (John Suler)

Why do people behave more aggressively online than offline?

• Dissociative Anonymity: "You don't know me." (Separating actions from real-world identity).
• Invisibility: "You can't see me." (Lack of eye contact/body language cues).
• Asynchronicity: "See you later." (Delay between sending a message and getting a reaction prevents immediate emotional feedback).
• Solipsistic Introjection: Reading messages as a voice inside one's own head, blurring boundaries between self and other.

B. Forms of Online Harassment

• Cyberbullying: Repeated harm inflicted through electronic text/media, often involving a power imbalance (common in adolescent demographics).
• Trolling: Deliberately posting offensive or provocative content to disrupt conversation and trigger emotional responses.
• Doxing: Researching and publicly broadcasting private or identifying information (address, phone number) about an individual without their consent.
• Revenge Porn (Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery): Distribution of sexually explicit images without the consent of the subject to cause humiliation.
• Swatting: Deceiving emergency services into sending a police response team (SWAT) to another person's address.

C. Sociological Implications

• Gendered Harassment: Studies show that women and LGBTQ+ individuals are disproportionately targeted with sexually violent rhetoric and threats (e.g., Gamergate).
• Silencing (The Chilling Effect): Victims of harassment often withdraw from online public spheres, reducing diversity of thought in digital democracy.
• Victim Blaming: Society often pressures victims to "just log off," ignoring the necessity of the internet for professional and social life.

3. Globalization Perspectives in Media

Globalization involves the flow of content, values, and technologies across international borders. This changes how violence is produced, consumed, and interpreted.

A. Cultural Imperialism vs. Hybridity

• Cultural Imperialism: The theory that Western (mostly US) media imposes its culture on developing nations. In the context of violence, this argues that Hollywood exports a culture of gun violence and militarism to societies where such behaviors were previously less glamorized.
• Cultural Hybridity/Glocalization: The mixing of global media formats with local traditions. Local creators may adopt the "action movie" format but infuse it with local political grievances or martial arts traditions.

B. The Global Flow of Radicalization

• Terrorism and Media: Modern terrorist groups (e.g., ISIS) utilize high-production-value media strategies, effectively "gamifying" war to recruit young people globally.
• Livestreaming Violence: Acts of terror (e.g., the Christchurch shooting) are now designed for the "viral" age, utilizing body-cam perspectives similar to First-Person Shooter (FPS) games to maximize global reach.

C. The Digital Divide

• While media is global, access is not equal. High-speed connectivity allows the Global North to dominate the narrative of violence.
• Conflicts in the Global South are often underreported or represented through the lens of Western media agencies ("Othering"), leading to a sanitized or biased view of global violence.

4. Cyber Crimes

Cybercrime encompasses criminal activities carried out by means of computers or the Internet. From a sociological perspective, this represents a shift in deviance and social control.

A. Categorization of Cyber Crimes

1. Cyber-Dependent Crimes: Crimes that can only be committed using a computer (e.g., Hacking, DDoS attacks, Malware creation).
2. Cyber-Enabled Crimes: Traditional crimes facilitated by technology (e.g., Online fraud, drug trafficking via the Dark Web, money laundering with crypto-currency).

B. Sociological Theories Applied to Cybercrime

• Routine Activity Theory: Crime occurs when three elements converge:
  1. A motivated offender.
  2. A suitable target (unsecured data, vulnerable users).
  3. Absence of a capable guardian (lack of encryption, poor policing).
     • Application: The internet provides endless targets and very few guardians.
• Techniques of Neutralization (Sykes and Matza): Cybercriminals often justify their actions to avoid guilt.
  • Denial of Injury: "The software company is rich; piracy doesn't hurt them."
  • Denial of Victim: "They had weak security; they deserved to be hacked."

C. Challenges in Regulation

• Jurisdiction: The internet has no borders, but laws are national. A hacker in Country A attacking a victim in Country B is difficult to prosecute.
• The Dark Web: Anonymity networks (like Tor) create spaces entirely outside traditional social control mechanisms.

5. Identity and Representation

This topic explores how media depictions of violence construct, reinforce, or challenge social identities (Race, Gender, Class).

A. Symbolic Violence (Pierre Bourdieu)

• Violence is not just physical; it is the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents.
• Media Representation: When the media systematically underrepresents or misrepresents a group, it commits symbolic violence.

B. Stereotyping and Violence

• Racial Profiling in Media:
  • Minority groups (particularly Black and Hispanic men) are disproportionately represented as perpetrators of crime in news and fiction.
  • White perpetrators are often framed as "mentally ill" or "lone wolves" (individualized), while minority perpetrators are framed as representatives of a violent culture (generalized).
• The "Ideal Victim": Media tends to focus on violence when the victim is white, female, and affluent (Missing White Woman Syndrome). Violence against minority women or marginalized groups receives significantly less coverage.

C. Video Games and Identity

• The "Other": Military shooters often depict enemies as nameless, faceless non-Westerners, reinforcing an "Us vs. Them" geopolitical identity.
• Avatar Interaction: Players can experiment with different identities (gender swapping, race swapping). While this can increase empathy, it can also lead to "Identity Tourism," where players adopt stereotypes without understanding the lived reality of those identities.

D. Algorithmic Bias

• Social media algorithms prioritize "high engagement" content. Anger and outrage generate the most engagement.
• Therefore, algorithms may amplify identity-based conflict and violent rhetoric because it is profitable, skewing public perception of different identity groups.