This research examines whether and to what extent cultural representations of violence are portrayed realistically. The research will set forth attributes of the pervasive influence of the mass media on the shape and content of culture in general and the variety of ways in which the culture reflects presentations of violence, with a view toward identifying ways in which such presentations affect the shape of lived experience.
Preoccupation with the power of mass media to shape real-life experience is at least as old as Marshall McLuhan's famous declaration that the medium is the message. Fundamentally that dictum has it that the power of the electronic media is so great that escaping their impact is virtually impossible in an industrialized culture. Related to the discourse of the mass media--indeed intimately bound up with it--is a discourse of violence that is said to penetrate the whole of industrialized culture. The effects of television violence on the behavior and social development of children and adolescents have been debated for decades; the connection has been riveted in popular imagination.
Systematic linkages between violence, culture, and mass media appear to have originated in academic and popular discourse in the wake of the political assassinations and social upheaval of the 1960s. It persists in the context of evidence that modern society is rife with violence that seems attributable to cues from popular culture, whether television, movies, or music. Cannon (19ff), for example, cites multiple reports of violent and grisly murders--from mass shootings in public places to torture killings--many of whose perpetrators explained their actions as being duplications of what had been viewed on television. In 1969, a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence included two chapters "concerned with TV violence and its effects" (Eysenck and Nias 180). By 1982 the National Institute of Mental H...