EBOOK: VIOLENCE AND THE MEDIA

Book excerpt: Why is there so much violence portrayed in the media? What meanings are attached to representations of violence in the media? Can media violence encourage violent behaviour and desensitize audiences toreal violence? Does the ‘everydayness’ of media violence lead to the ‘normalization’ of violencein society? Violence and the Media is a lively and indispensable introduction to current thinkingabout media violence and its potential influence on audiences.Adopting a freshperspective on the ‘media effects’ debate, Carter and Weaver engage with a host ofpressing issues around violence in different media contexts - including news, film,television, pornography, advertising and cyberspace.The book offers a compellingargument that the daily repetition of media violence helps to normalize and legitimizethe acts being portrayed. Most crucially, the influence of media violence needs to beunderstood in relation to the structural inequalities of everyday life. Using a widerange of examples of media violence primarily drawn from the American and Britishmedia to illustrate these points, Violence and the Media is a distinctive and revealingexploration of one of the most important and controversial subjects in cultural andmedia studies today.