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324 Perry Hinton

2. Media effects

Firstly, it is interesting to note that much of the work on the effect of the media
within Communication Studies – especially the impact of television on its audi-
ence – has been undertaken apparently without particular reference to culture.
For example, it is quite possible to examine major modern texts on ‘media ef-
fects’ and not find the word ‘culture’ in the index at all (see Bryant and Zillman
1994; Potter 1999). Hence, there is an apparent separation of the cultural con-
text in which the debate arises and the outcomes of the research indicating a
media effect – with the resultant implication that the effect could well be uni-
versal. With the globalization of media messages we also have the attendant glo-
balization of the concerns about the effect of the media on the audience, parti-
cularly children. Indeed, Carlsson states “Many people suspect a correlation
between the rising level of violence in daily life, particularly, that committed by
children and youth, and the culture of violence our children encounter on televi-
sion, in video films, in computer games and via Internet” (Carlsson 1999: 9). We
could therefore argue that the fact that Bryant and Zillman and Potter are writing
in the United States of America and Carlsson in Sweden is irrelevant to the re-
search in this area and that we are dealing with an issue of equal concern across
cultures. However, I wish to question the extent to which we can we divorce this
concern from its cultural origin and create a discourse around ‘the violence of
youth’ devoid of its cultural setting.
Much of the academic debate on the effect of media violence was stimulated
by the work of Bandura and his colleagues in the early 1960s in the United
1
States of America (e.g., Bandura, Ross and Ross 1963) . In their experiments,
young children (3–6 years) were shown, in certain circumstances, to imitate an
adult model whom they had observed punching and hitting a blow-up ‘bobo’
doll. This and subsequent studies refined the conditions under which modelling
would or would not take place (Bandura 1977). As a result of these studies,
television was seen as an exemplar role model in the shaping of children’s imi-
tative behaviour. Thus, the audience was viewed as susceptible under the right
conditions (or wrong conditions depending on which way one looks at it) to the
influence of the media. As a result, it was argued that watching violent televised
behaviour could then lead to real-life violent behaviour. And we have evidence
of an apparently universal effect.
Yet when we look for the context of the research on media effects, it often
lies within a wider public discourse existing within the culture in which the re-
search is based. There is no exception in this case. If we examine one of Band-
ura’s early articles (Bandura, Ross and Ross 1963 – the first specifically on film
mediation), we find right at the beginning, within the introduction, the following
quote: “A recent incident (San Francisco Chronicle 1961) in which a boy was
seriously knifed during a re-enactment of a switchblade knife fight the boys had