media magazine

Categories of Violence
Here are the four key assumptions that underpin the tradition of concern about the effects of media violence:

1. ‘Violence’ is a unit of meaning that can be abstracted from occasions and modes of occurrence, and measured – with the correspondent assumption that the more violence there is, the greater its potential for influence.
2. There is a mechanism, usually called ‘identification’, which makes viewers of ‘violence’ vulnerable to it – such that it thereby becomes a ‘message’ by which they are invaded and persuaded.
3. The task of media researchers is to identify those who are especially ‘vulnerable’ to the influence of these ‘messages’.
4. All these can be done on the presumption that such messages are ‘harmful’, because ‘violence’ is intrinsically anti-social.