http://subculturalcosmopolite.wordpress.com/

            A blog dedicated to the issue of subcultures, social trends, music and philosophies that surely affect society and vice versa. Interesting discourse on how the original messages of certain subcultures are turning against them and how many of the formerly extreme trends and subcultures are becoming more and more of a mainstream. I strongly recommend to look at the “moshing” section  - a  relatively new phenomenon defining the most intense music performances.

Paul Fox – Video Games, Do they have that big of an impact?

http://videogamesviolence.blogspot.com/

            A blog dedicated to violent video-gaming and its alleged harmful effects on children. Various interesting facts about gaming industry, current controversies and incidents are presented as well as author’s opinion on the issue of parental influence as a major source of values and behavioral patterns for children.

Ethan Senn – File-sharing/Copyright Infringement

            http://ethanasenn.blogspot.com/

The blog deals with the issue of intellectual property; particularly with the legal background of video-streaming. Ethan presents thorough knowledge of the problematic and well constructed arguments. High informational and opinion-forming value of the blog is undeniable.

Daniela Mikušová - Children and Advertising

            http://web.mac.com/daniela.mikus/BLOGPROJECT/Welcome.html

            How, and to what extent the advertising influences our children is the issue discussed in Daniela’s blog. Well chosen audio-visuals, as well as highly relevant articles demonstrate Daniela’s interest in the topic what ultimately results in high informational and educational value of the blog,

Martin Husar – Ads and Sex

http://www.martin1854.wordpress.com

Martin examines the increasing trend of incorporating sexual imagery into advertisement these days. Provoking and controversial images sell, that’s why they are so ubiquitous I guessJ.

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/effects_media_violence.cfm

A web portal which could be described as one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of media education and Internet literacy resources. The issue of media violence is being looked at and addressed from various angles, thus divided into more sections such as: Violence in Media Entertainment, The Business of Media Violence, Research on the Effects of Media Violence et cetera.

Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General

http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/youthviolence/toc.html

A webpage especially dedicated to the issue of youth violence. Among other sections I would recommend you to take a look at chapter 4 which talks about the risk factors for youth violence and chapter 1 and its section on myths of youth violence which seem to refute many attitudes that are publicly held in regards to youth violence.

Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked

http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html

An essay written by Henry Jenkins, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, attempts to demystify the most common eight myths about video gaming. Jenkins seems to be successfully rebutting the claim that, ‘the availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence,’ by using credible statistical evidence from Surgeon General’s report.

The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humour, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Michael Moore takes on a deeper examination of America’s culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with widespread gun ownership. Furthermore, he seeks to investigate and confront the powerful elite political and corporate interests fanning this culture for their own unscrupulous gain. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

However, the frequency of exposure to violence has changed overtime quite significantly. According to the studies, by the time a child finishes elementary school he or she has witnessed at least 8,000 fictional murders on TV or other media plus 100,000 other acts of violence (Harris 1999). The fact, that children nowadays grow up in a more media-saturated environment than ever before makes it often very easy for the resentful public to attribute the causes of aggressive and violent behavior to media; whether is it TV, video games or the Internet. Even though that hundreds of studies were conducted over the last decades in order to determine the extent to which the exposure to media violence is the cause of real-life violence their results were very often contradictory. The longest study, on the subject of television violence, that still runs in presence is the one conducted by George Gerbner. His seminal research suggests that heavy TV viewers tend to perceive the world in ways that are consistent with the images on TV. As viewers’ perceptions of the world come to conform to the depictions they see on TV, they become more passive, more anxious, and more fearful. Gerbner calls this the “Mean World Syndrome.” So far, the study has shown that those who watch greater amount of television are more likely to: overestimate their risk of being victimized by crime, believe that their neighborhoods are unsafe, believe that “fear of crime is a very serious personal problem,” assume the crime rate is increasing, even though the statistical evidence proves that it is not (Media-Awareness.ca).

Although it is known as a fact that frequent exposure to media violence shares a certain portion of responsibility for the real-world violence such claim as, ‘an epidemic of youth violence is hitting streets due to the rise of violent video gaming ,’ seems to me rather far-fetched and significantly overstates and oversimplifies the role of media. All this hype about media teaching wrong values, creating false notion of reality and proliferating violence appears to serve as a sort of a smokescreen that prevents the public from seeing and focusing on factors and threats of much greater importance.

Ultimately, I find the parental supervision and involvement in children’s lives far more influential than the entire “media package” that is constantly being blamed for any ‘undesirable effects’ which occur on daily basis. Parents cannot expect the media to transmit only positive values to their kids any more than they can expect Tesco, a giant money-making chain of grocery stores, to sell only healthy food. Consider it a simplistic comparison but it is a matter of fact that the media we are exposed to are primarily huge multinational corporations (i.e. News Corp., Viacom) whose content is determined by popular demand and the morality is simply forced to step aside for the dull ‘profit-making entertainment’ to take place.

Works Cited

Harris, Richard. Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication. New Jersey, USA:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 189.

“Research on the Effects of Media Violence.” Media Awareness Network. 2 Jan. 2008

<http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/effects_media_violence

.cfm>.

George Gerbner, former dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of Cultural Environment Movement (CEM), and Todd Gitlin, a high-profile veteran of the 1960s peace movement and a leading U.S. commentator and author on media and culture issues, are expressing their opinions on the issue. The overall attitudes of both participants are stated at the very beginning of the article where George Gerbner, being resistant to the idea of media violence falling under the heading of free speech, says, “Media violence is tantamount to censorship by media conglomerates who effectively shut out diverse points of view.” His opponent Mr. Gitlin, who basically says “yes” to the question of whether media violence is a matter of free speech, calls the crusade against media violence “hollow” and “cheap.” He says, “Media violence isn’t dangerous, it’s just stupid.”

Media ownership, V-chip, the nature and sophistication of the televised violence are merely few things that are addressed by both sides throughout the debate. Despite having quite contradictory opinions concerning the use of V-chip as a parental tool for protecting their children from undesirable effects of mediated violence, both authorities seem to finally agree upon the fact that, “The problem goes beyond violence, ratings, or any single factor, to the heart of the system. Television is driven not by the creative people who have something to tell, but by global conglomerates that have something to sell.”

An article by Duke Ferris, an ordinary fan of video gaming and a registered member of the ‘Game Revolution’ online community, is a response to “the current media frenzy and barrage of lawsuits surrounding violent video games.” Using the official statistical evidence obtained from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics, the author proves to a great extent that an epidemic of youth violence in America due to prevalence of violent video games is a false concept manufactured, distributed and perpetuated by media. Among other facts, Ferris presents the results of an analysis of the risk factors of youth violence conducted by Surgeon General of the United States of America that say that violent media is categorized as ‘Small Effect Size.’ Twenty-seven risk factors rated higher than the exposure to media violence, including things like socio-economic status, academic failure, poor parent-child relations or weak social ties. The author seems to identify with Michael Moore’s, the director of ‘Bowling for Columbine’ documentary, attitude towards media and governments as pumping fear into veins of citizens for economic reasons. Fear sells, and that is for sure, a constant fear based campaign altogether leading to a higher consumption. The only thing that news media care for is attention which is primarily brought by reports of gruesome events, like murder, rape or AIDS epidemic. The by-product of these reports is the false notion of reality created in minds of the viewers, who tend to believe that world is such a violent place and all the protection at disposal is inevitable. The end of the article presents an interesting fact and that is, that according to the FBI the murder rate hit its 40 year low in 2004, the exact year when the best-selling video game of the year was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – a game that is considered to be the most popular and controversial (due to its violent nature) of all time.

The interesting point to this tragedy is that the shooter left behind a suicide letter entitled “Natural Selector’s Manifesto” in which he explains the motives for his deed and also presents his view of our world and humanity. A transcript of this letter can be found below this posting. It is a copy of a video-shot letter version that is available on YouTube. There were no changes made to the original document, even the grammatical errors weren’t corrected as far as I’m concerned. The reason why I compiled this letter into MS Word document is because it is simply hard to read the text off the actual video due to its low quality (the letters are sort of blurred or something). I hope you’ll find it useful.

Back to the point I was trying to make, the letter explains quite thoroughly the reasons behind young man’s action portraying almost the entire humanity as retarded, feeble-minded and easily manipulated mass. At the very end of his letter, Pekka (the shooter) claims that it is definitely not the music, movies, video games or the books that made him decide to commit such awful deed. Neither is it the parents or friends who should be blamed for his action, he says. He takes all the responsibility with him.

Although he denies that the types of media listed above had influenced him to perpetrate such crime I can still see a certain link between those two; however, it is rather a subtle one and not as explicit as authorities and people involved might be looking for.

It is for sure that media shape our opinions and attitudes we hold and in this case it seems that Pekka’s impression of humanity as being a retarded mass blindly following trends of consumerism goes hand in hand with the way the society is nowadays depicted in media. A consumer society obsessed with materialistic values. A swarm of people led by corrupted governments. Ultimately, these are the things that concerned young Pekka the most and frustrated him. He no longer wanted to be a part of this reality, he considered himself far more independent and capable of determining his own fate than the rest of the population surrounding him.

“Natural Selector Manifesto” – transcript of the suicide letter

The phenomenon of ‘happy slapping’ seems to originate in south London as a craze that has later become a nationwide and even a borders-crossing issue. ‘Happy slapping’ can be characterized as a crazy idea in which an unsuspecting victim, almost always selected at random, is attacked by a group or an individual while an accomplice is in charge of filming it on a camera (usually a mobile phone camera). Find out more about “Happy Slapping”

In contrast to the case of Jokela High School shooting (discussed before), where the link between media violence or media as such and the actual motives for perpetrating the crime was rather of an implicit nature, this incident appears to give some credit to the theory that supports the idea of direct link between the exposure to violent imagery and real-life violence. As acknowledged by the court, the fact that this gang’s tactics in many ways reminded those of the teenagers from Anthony Burgess’s novel “A Clockwork Orange” might not be just a pure coincidence. Shortly after the novel was filmed and publicly viewed in 1971 a series of violent crimes emerged that were apparently inspired by this movie. A 17 year old girl was rapped under the sound of “Singing in the rain” that was hummed by her rapists, just like Alex’s gang did in the film. In addition a 16 year old boy tortured a younger child wearing the facsimiled uniform of Alex. Both events proved that the film had a negative impact towards the society.

From my personal experience, I must state that despite the fact that there are hundreds of other movies which contain far more detailed scenes of gore and violence this one stands out for many reasons. It hardly comes as a surprise that this movie was labeled ‘controversial’ since I can vividly imagine an emotionally unstable adolescent that would love to identify with such person as Alex; the main character – relentless and sickly passionate for violence. The thing that is probably considered the most irritable and of serious concern among public is that all the violent acts, such as fight, rape or murder, are accompanied by jolly music which only enforces the feeling of characters having extreme fun, while beating people to death.