Mass Com Theories

2. Popular video games and the Internet have often been blamed and criticized as the source of violence among youth. Do you think this statement is justified? Using relevant media theories, provide examples to prove or disprove this claim.

In my opinion, popular video games and the internet are to be blamed and criticized as the source of violence among youth. This is said because most entertaining and popular video games involves violence, such as Assassins Creed, God of War, Man Hunt and so on. The video games as mentioned are deemed as violent because it involves acts of killing people in the goriest manner. In terms of the internet, internet violence is defined as any kind of violent act, like as any harm or harass other people in a deliberate manner, by using information technology.  Teens are exposed to internet violence every single day, as technology advances, word spreads quicker around in social media. In this manner, it is difficult to discover media notices of terrible things that can occur on the net, including encounters like cyberbullying and awful exposures, for example, abhor destinations or pictures of individuals perished or passing on a news site.

There are several media theories that can help prove my point of view about video game and internet violence. First of all, I would like to start with social learning theory. Bandura's social learning hypothesis expresses that individuals gain from each other, utilizing perception, impersonation, and demonstrating. As per Bandura, individuals gain from watching and impersonating other individuals, and at last learning and recalling their results. The human behaviour is formed by observing others, then the new behaviour that is learned and observed serves as a coded guide to be carried out later on.  In Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment, he found out children that was exposed to violent behaviours were more likely to exhibit violent behaviours themselves. Therefore, this theory is relevant when it comes to proving that violent video games are the source of violence among youths. Some trust that playing savage computer games impacts kids and youthful grown-ups to copy the characters in the videogame and that it desensitizes us to vicious acts. As evidence, on the 7th of June 2003, an 18-year-old adolescent, Devin Moore killed three people because of a playing Grand Theft Auto. The young murderer was trying to execute a mission that was in the game in real life, and the mission was to kill police officers and escape in a police car, and Moore completed the mission in real life. Devin Moore was then apprehended and sentenced to death on October 9, 2005.

Also, with the Web and fast broadband into our lives, the hugeness of social learning hypothesis in media has developed and its impact can barely be separated. Today's informal communication locales can be gotten to easily and it helps in forming the conduct of young people. Since the virtual world is to a great extent without impediments and without physical personality, it is less demanding to put on an imaginary character and partake in exercises that could be unlawful in all actuality. All in all, social learning in media has turned out to be a great deal more pertinent than any time in recent memory due to the high presentation to media among youngsters. Criticisms of social learning theory blame the media for non-selectively giving information without any verifications, warning that this could lead to overexposure of today’s youth to violence and corruption. This exposure could influence them to develop the atrocious behaviours observed.

Up next, the Magic Bullet Theory is also a factor of proving my point. The Magic Bullet Theory, also known as the Hypodermic Needle, is a direct model of correspondence profoundly established in behavioural belief systems. The main concept of the theory is that the audience is a compliant thing that is directly impacted by the message being conveyed by the mass media in its purest meaning. The idea of a needle or a bullet is that it gets planted right into the receiver by the sender without any sort of interaction between the both parties. The theory emphasizes that because this has such a strong and instantaneous effect on the viewers that the mass media can persuade people to make uniform decisions because they are helpless to be resistant to the effect of the message. This theory paints the mass media as a potentially dangerous and effective weapon because it affects people so greatly, especially when it comes to children that are still not mature enough. Children are like sponges, as their brains are still developing, they absorb everything they see and hear, this makes the hypodermic needle theory much more effective. Children’s brains are still not mature enough to think rationally, they cannot differentiate what is right and what is wrong.  An example would be the overwhelming violence in some of the key titles of video games that would make an effect on the child without thinking too much into the message. Whilst many could argue that it makes the child more violent, it has shown to make the child more desensitised to violence. As an example, a grandmother, Marie Smothers, aged 87, was shot by her 8-year-old grandson to death in her home in September of 2013, The young boy shot his grandmother in the back of the head. Unfortunately, her 8-year-old grandson cannot be charged as he is under the age of 10 and psychologists and detectives say the violent “Grand Theft Auto” video game is to blame.