Influence of the Mass Media on Violence

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

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eature of women's social and cultural disempowerment and pornography as its mediating provenance, if male sexuality is the presumptive baseline for pornographic content. For where male sexuality is the standard, women's sexuality "as such is a stigma. . . . We [women] are not allowed to have it; we are not allowed to talk about it . . . from our own point of view. . . . [W]e have to be either asexual or virgins" (MacKinnon 517). Alas, the lesson of the real world is that asexual women and virgins, like matrons and ingénues, are subject to rape. While Bourdieu does not address the linkage between pornographic representations of violence and actual sex crimes, he does articulate a basis for women's objections to pornography's effects. He cites women's "revulsion" toward distasteful artifacts (e.g., pictures of a wounded man) as a feature of the fact that they are more "subject to the traditional model of the sexual division of labour and . . . weaker [in] their cultural capital and [] lower . . . in the social hierarchy" (Bourdieu 40). On the issue of pornography, then, and appreciating the reality of women's comparatively low cultural capital, MacKinnon is making a positive argument for rethinking the very structure of thought abo
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Approximate Word count = 5095
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)

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