Summary:
Industries spend millions of dollars for advertisement of their products; and producers have become lax about the violence within their shows due to violence's high sales factor. Public acceptance does little to disuade priducers from continuing in this manner.
Imagine yourself running though the plains of The Barrens or riding though Winterspring on your gigantic kodo, when an enemy alliance starts to attack you. You hurriedly hop off your kodo and stab the enemy to death. If this were you, you would be playing the game, World of Warcraft. In a game all about entertainment and violence, the player gets to act out there character on their screen while doing almost absolutely nothing in real life. Entertainment and violence is also a big reason for the television. Although both are very entertaining, the negative media you watch has a very large effect on our society.
First of all, we can see the problems by looking at the increasing amount of media objects and media content that is right in front of us. Televisions have become one of the most important media providers of our time, and we can see this because in 1950 only ten percent of Americans owned a television, and in just ten years, almost ninety percent of Americans owned a television. Fifty-four percent of U.S children have a television in their bedrooms, and were there is a television, there is always some kind of violent or negative content. Almost eighty percent of television programs and movies contain violent or negative content. The Kids Project at Harvard said, "Today's movies contain significantly more violence, sex, and profanity on average than movies of the same rating a decade ago" (PG-13", 2004). Not only in TV is the violence prevailing but violent video games have become a substantial part of our society. Seventy-four percent of video games have some kind of violent content, whether is be shooting a virtual gun or stabbing a virtual character.
Second, we can look at who is involved with these problems. The typical American child watches twenty-eight hours of TV a week, and by the age of eighteen will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence. But ninety percent of violent content is directed toward men, not kids. Once again television is not the only source of violent content; video games have expanded and more and more people have begun to play them. Ten percent of children aged two to eighteen play console and computer video games more than one hour per day, and among eight to thirteen year old boys, the average is more than seven and a half hours a week on video games. In 1998, thirteen and a third of high school senior boys played at least six hours of video games, and by 1999, almost fifteen percent did. In rare cases, two percent of men reported playing video games for twenty or more hours per week. In combined usage of both television and video games, youth between the ages of eight and eighteen spend more than forty hours per week using some type of media.
Thirdly, after seeing who is involved, we can see why they are so actively involved with media content. Four out of every five men, said they enjoy the violent content in their movies and video games. People also watch TV and play video games for the thrill of rehearsing aggression sequences over and over again. Not only are people attracted to video games because of thrill but also because some of the violence in video games is directly rewarding.
Upon seeing the problems, why people are involved, and who is involved, we see the negative results of the media. One general effect of the negative TV content is, for every hour of television watched by a child aged one to three, that child faces a ten percent increased risk of having problems by school age. Young children who watch television also have an increased risk of attention problems by school age. Another general effect of TV content is, fifteen percent of children questioned usually watch TV alone, and not with their families. Violent content seems to have more of an effect on media than just general negative content. As you read above, children have increased risks of problems in early years from negative media, but with violent media comes the health and well-being of developing children, adolescents, and the stability of a family. Violence has become a part of television and Americans are "soaking it up" (Tanner, 2004). Since Americans have been soaking up the violence it is increasing. Television is responsible for ten percent of youth violence, and young people who watch a lot of violence have a heightened risk of aggressive behavior. A study of population data for various countries showed homicides rates doubling within the ten to fifteen years after the introduction of televisions. With the introduction of computers, violent video games furthermore cause increased aggressive behavior.
With all of these negative results of media, why doesn't one just stop using it all together? The difficulty of stopping lies within the industry, the stores, and the parents. The industries spends millions of dollars for advertisement of their products, and producers have become lenient about the violence they put into their shows. Like the industry, stores are not holding up there side either. Even though a video game has a mature rating, for seventeen years old or older, most stores still sell the game to underage children. If the children get a hold of a video game like this, the parents are the next that should take action, but some do not. Eighty-nine percent of kids in grades eight to twelve said their parents did not limit their play time, and ninety percent said their parents do not check the rating of their video games.
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