Washington IV

Culture-Media Reflections

Some responses to a blog for my MBA Organizational Theory class in addressing the issues on the causes and effects of media on culture, below is my two part response:

My first response exemplifies that there is a perpetuation and proliferation of violence in the media and that the best way to curtail its effects is through a greater understanding by instituting media education.

The movie industry has grown increasingly towards a shift in violence and horror in its films. The question we have been asking over and over is what kind of impact does this violence have on American school children and adults. The impact of violence really depends on the personality and character traits of young adults and children. A child or teenager who has been brought up in an abusive family and has been hit as a child is more likely to lash out at other people, especially if they have just seen a very violent film like the “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” On the other hand, children who have been brought up in caring and nurturing environments really aren’t affected by these films. A good way to deal with horror and violent films that teenagers and young children see is to talk to them about it. Having parents talk with their children allows children to understand what they have just seen and that the film is not real. Some children think that shooting a gun is cool. Parents must take responsibility and talk with their children to make them understand that it is not cool and in fact very dangerous. The debate still remains on the “culture of violence,” and on the normalization of aggression and lack of empathy that plagues our society as a whole. To put things in perspective, the ancient Romans engaged and reveled in the lethal spectator sports, the Mayan civilization made a spectacle of ritualistic killings, and the Mongols raped and pillaged entire towns. In the historical perspective, violence has always played a role in entertainment. It has been found that research indicates that media violence has not just increased in quantity; it has also become much more graphic, much more sexual, and much more sadistic. Concerns about media violence have grown as television and movies have acquired a global audience. It boils down to money and media entertainment is big business, popular culture products are now the United States’ biggest export. “In 2001, people around the world spent US $14 billion going to the movies. American media corporations earn at least half of their profits from foreign sales.”

Of course, violence is a time-honored element in stories told through the ages about what it means to live in a society and relate to other people. It’s an eye opener for young people to realize that the main reason for the proliferation of media violence is money. Violence and action are understood by all in a global market. If kids are growing up in a media-saturated culture, which they are, media education can help them articulate their attitudes and feelings towards violence.

My second response deals with the real world effects of the over-saturation of violence on society through the various mediums.

I will first discuss the social theorist Jean Baurillard and his observations and writings on society in a post-modern world. “We live in a world dominated by simulated experience and feelings, Baudrillard believes, and have lost the capacity to comprehend reality as it really exists. We only experience prepared realities– edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the destruction of cultural values and the substitution of referendum.” In Baudrillard’s words,”The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyper reality which is entirely in simulation.” The masses no longer make themselves evident as a class (a category which has lost its force because of a proliferation of possible identities), they have been swamped by so much meaning that they have lost all meaning. They have been so continuously analyzed through statistics, opinion polls and marketing that they do not respond to enlightened political representation.

What Baudrillard is stating is that the mere existence of reality is a fabrication of what we deem it so. The lines have blurred where reality once existed and fiction has taken root through a numbed society that has succumbed to a world in which life has become a hyper-sensory simulation. Through this simulation of sorts, desensitization has taken effect on the masses and has skewed our perception of what’s normal/healthy/benign etc…Contemporary movies that contain hyper-real violence increase this desensitization that is infecting the American youth. Media and tabloid television are also seen as forms of imagery that celebrate and glorify violence on a large scale. When violence is glorified and mainstreamed, into culture it no longer holds a powerful degree of wrongness; instead it becomes more acceptable. Media is playing a large role in the desensitization of America. As a culture we celebrate and glorify criminals and violence. There are reality TV shows dedicated to crimes and dedicated to violence. The television cannot be turned on without some form of violence being exemplified or glorified. Another interesting angle to examine is the work conducted by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. He devised an entire system based on operant conditioning, in which the organism is in the process of “operating” on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. Through the analysis of this conditioning , Skinner examined a new set of questions with behavior modification. This basically stated that one’s behavior can be modified through conditioning and reinforcement. With the examination of Baudrillard and Skinner, I am proposing the statement that we as a culture are being modified and conditioned to have a predisposition to violence and we are actually being programmed to perpetuate these violent feelings towards certain “characters” that we are told that are evil (e.g. Terrorists in the vain of Middle Eastern Islamic extremists or Communist entities that vow resistance to the American way of life to name a few). Violence incites a combination of fear and hate and this fear and hate are used as a shaping mechanism to influence our perception of the world in which we live, reinforced by our hyper-stimulus through mass-media. At the end of the day, the modern media is just another form of propaganda so delicately used by our government to influence the opinions or behavior of the public. It has followed a strong campaign not only nationally, but internationally, establishing a grand campaign with a strategic transmission to indoctrinate the American way of life. Violence is a way to deal with fear and people are eager to quench their innate and primitive desires with the virtual display of carnage. It’s the opiate of the masses engineered by this seemingly nationalistic, militaristic, corporate, authoritarian state we now call the U.S. of A. Control is the key word and the only way to defect and rebel is through the resistance of accepting this false methodological use of violence to penetrate our minds and govern the way we live.