Page 249 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

VIOLENCE

VIOLENCE

Physical attack or abuse, normally interpersonal, but also person-to-
object (and in some scenarios, vice versa). It can include domestic
violence and interpersonal violence, as well as acts of war. What
counts as violence requires both context and cultural agreement.
Sports contain forms of violent behaviour that are not so labelled, for
instance boxing, wrestling, ice hockey and gridiron. But in another
context, much less aggressive acts may ‘count’ as violence – aggression
in children’s TV shows, for instance.
Violence in society is often attributed to the effects of the media,
with each new form of medium attracting criticism for the escalation
of this unwanted social behaviour. Comic books, film, television,
video games and the Internet have all endured public disquiet about
their content and its supposed effects. However, as Goldstein argues,
the debate over violent entertainment focuses ‘only on its production
while ignoring its public reception’ (1998a: 1, emphasis in original),
thus leaving the possible pleasurable effects of this form of
entertainment out of the equation. O’Shaughnessy, for example,
argues that violent entertainment provides a form of fantasy for
viewers, allowing ‘us to explore and understand our sexual and violent
feelings’ (1999: 29).
Whether or not depictions of violence provide some form of
exploration for viewers is rarely questioned. Methodologies such as
the effects model prefer instead to assume that ‘violence is an
abstractable unit whose presence can be counted and whose influence
can be studied’ (Barker and Petley, 2001: 3). This model ignores ‘the
moral codes that different audiences bring to bear as they watch’
(2001: 7) as well as the context in which a violent act is represented. As
Cerulo (1998: 13) notes, a young boy’s torture of small domestic
animals will be considered a violent act, yet the same experimentation
carried out in the context of the laboratory is considered a scientific
one. The same is true of representations of violence. Contextual
consideration in content analysis along with ethnography and
historical considerations may prove more enlightening in under-
standing howand why people use forms of violent entertainment (see
Goldstein, 1998b).
Finally, it is worth noting that increased representations of violence
do not necessarily say anything about society’s attitudes towards these
acts. As Casey et al. rightly note, ‘unlike many forms of comedy or
drama, violence requires little translation and therefore travels well’

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