Audience Theories and Impact of Media Content

 LO6 - Evaluate legal, ethical and regulatory issues associated with media products.

Violent Films

- It (15) - only a small amount of blood, doesn't need to be as high but does contain swearing

- Saw (R)

- Crawl (R) - lots of blood but no other violent content

- The Joker (15) - 

- Home Alone (PG) - suitable due to violent content but comedy

Impact of Media

The Hypodermic Needle Theory

Packard's Hypodermic Syringe theory discusses the audience as being passive and the negative impact of mass media products with reference to persuasive advertising.

Passive Audience Theory

Mass media is able to inject ideas into people's heads and reinforces the idea that audiences have limited resistance to media messages. There is concern about the copycat effects as it assumes that the audience will copy whatever they see.

Gerbner and Gross' cultivation theory suggests that over time, repetition of viewing violent acts allows certain ideas and values to become normalised. By repetitive viewing of violent images in TV, film or video games the audience may become desensitised.

Cohen's Moral Panic Theory - Cohen's theory originally focused on the conflict between Mods and Rockers in the 60s as to the way that music and fashion had a negative influence on teenagers. Moral panics are when the media distorts a problem in order to create fear by over emphasising and stereotyping a group of people to create fear eg. knife crime, the red scare

Examples - Rambo is a series of violent films, which the murderer of 17 people was a big fan of. He dressed up as Rambo and killed several people before killing himself when he got caught.

The Columbine massacre was a school shooting and attempted bombing done by two 12th grade students - killing 15 people including themselves. Marilyn Manson, a rock musician was blamed for the shooting as the two perpetrators were a fan of violent entertainment- specifically his music. People thought that because his music was so different, fans of his were encouraged to rape, murder and comment crime through the violent and gothic music. It turns out they were not even fans and that the association had been falsely made. Furthermore, Doom - a video game that was one of the first person shooter games inspiring games like Call of Duty. It was extremely graphic for it's time and the murders were avid players - saying that murder would be just as easy in real life as in the game. They also made a classroom project video where they pretended to be in the game - carrying guns and killing athletes. A study was also done using the video game Wolfenstein where those who had played it spent longer 'punishing' their opponent using loud noises than those who had played a non-violent game.