Actual Media Effects vs. Assumed Media Effects

Imagine making a film only to be told that your film does not meet required standards in order to be released in a certain country. Those requirements include not having specific elements such as extreme violence and portrayals of sex, or more importantly any kind of link between them.

Media such as film has always portrayed violence, as it is far from anything new, and so similarly stands people's rising and falling concern over said media. Or more specifically, how this media, will and does effect those who view it.

So institutions such as the British Board of Film Censors and the National Board of Censorship appear to help regulate the media that could negatively impact people. The problem though is that new technologies have made even blocked media, accessible. The internet alone provides an instant window to nearly anything that pops into the computer operator's head.

Examples appear all over the place of murder, rape, and other acts of violence that most people would like to believe people aren't capable of, such as the Columbine shootings. The fact that people are impressionable is enough to make people question whether it's a good idea to have depictions of harmful violence.

In reality, whenever there is a fatal tragedy, people look for who to blame. If they can simply figure out the guilty party, they can be separated from the crowd so as to no longer cause harm on the public, and punished. It makes people feel better. While this would seem to make sense, people are not focusing on what else these acts teach us, that perhaps we are too quick to blame, and that in itself should be what we ask ourselves about. Or as Graham Murdock puts it, "the moral panics sparked by such tragic and newsworthy events tell us less about the motives or chain of events that might have led to such a tragedy than they do about the 'latent social fears and concerns of the culture in which they occur."

The link between media and real life violence cannot be proven. Research has shown that the subject centers less on the actual effects of media and more on the assumptions of the effects of media. It circles back to the question, does art mirror real life, or does real life mirror art?