International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

For over a century violence in the media has been framed as a “problem” by social commentators. The arrival of a new medium (from the early tabloids to comic books, from →  cinema to the →  Internet ) has typically been accompanied by a wave of concern about its potential for “exposing” an audience to representations considered undesirable by policymakers and moral guardians (→  Tabloid Press ; Comics ; Morality and Taste in Media Content ). It is no accident that it is the mass availability of these texts that has typically been of concern: the “mass” audience being conceived as endangered and dangerous, vulnerable and victimizing (→  Violence as Media Content, Effects of ). These concerns have also shaped academic debate. As a result, work on violence in the media has been concentrated in social science disciplines, particularly in the US, and the work of arts and humanities scholars has been marginalized in public debate and policymaking. One of the difficulties of summarizing this work is that there is no clear consensus as to what violence is. Much work in the field has defined violence as a physical action (a punch, a slap, a shooting). One of the benefits of such a definition is that it makes it relatively easy to determine how much violence there is in a text or group of texts. Content analysis has been a key method for analyzing violence in the media (→  Content Analysis, ... log in or subscribe to read full text