Crime-Media Theories - Lecture notes 3 PDF

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Looking at the all the core theorises behind the media and how they intersect with youth crime- key part of the module....

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Media Theories: The magic bullet theory-- or hypodermic needle theory argues that media messages impact people in direct, measurable, and immediate ways, as if a bullet hit the body, or as if the body was injected with a substance from a needle. Desensitisation theory argues that viewers’ emotional reactions to media violence will result in desensitization, that is, that exposure to media violence will undermine feelings of concern, empathy, or sympathy that viewers might have toward victims of actual violence. Cultivation Theory argues: Persistent long term exposure to TV content has small but measurable effects on the perceptual worlds of audience members.  TV has surpassed religion as the key storyteller of our (US American) culture.  Violence is TV’s principal message. TV places marginalised people in symbolic double jeopardy by simultaneously under-representing and overvictimizing them 

Social Action Theory argues:   

Media audiences participate actively in mediated communication; they construct meanings from the content they perceive. Social action theory sees communication interaction in terms of actors’ intent, receivers' interpretations, and message content. Meaning is not delivered in the communication process, rather it is constructed within it

Sociological theories of media violence explore the ways that the media impact and reinforce dominant ideologies and values in a culture. Cultural Criminology • • •

Explores the many ways in which cultural forces interweave with the practice of crime and crime control in contemporary society. Actively seeks to dissolve conventional understandings of accepted boundaries, of criminology itself. Looks for new ways to see crime and our response to it.

Critical Criminology argues that television news represses the diversity of opinions in any given situation, reproduces a dominant ideology and silences contradictory voices. Cultural theories examine people within in a culture and try to understand or predict how or why they act or react a certain way. Marxism proposes that the media like all other capitalist institutions are owned by the ruling bourgeois élite and operate in the interests of that class, denying access to oppositional or alternative views. Feminist theories maintain that gender is socially constructed expectations that systematically exclude or marginalize women, and privilege the position of men. Critical Race Theories challenge the ways that race and racial power are constructed by law and culture.

Media Theories - Analysis Content analysis is a research tool focused on the actual content and internal features of media. It is used to determine the presence of certain words, concepts, themes, phrases, characters, or sentences within texts or sets of texts and to quantify this presence in an objective manner. Conceptual Analysis  A concept is chosen for examination and the number of its occurrences within the text recorded.  Once chosen, the text must be coded into content categories.  By breaking down the contents of materials into meaningful and pertinent units of information, certain characteristics of the message may be analysed and interpreted. Relational analysis builds on conceptual analysis by examining the relationships among concepts in a text. For relational analysis, it is important to first decide which concept type(s) will be explored in the analysis. Discourse analysis is a general term for a number of approaches to analysing written, spoken or signed language use. Narrative Analysis • Focuses on “the ways in which people make and use stories to interpret the world”

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Views narratives as social products that are produced by people in the context of specific social, historical and cultural locations. • Views narratives as interpretive devices through which people represent themselves and their worlds to themselves and to others.

Young People and the Media In time we hate that which we often fear. William Shakespeare  Fear is an extremely powerful motivational force.  In public policy debates, appeals to fear are often used in an attempt to sway opinion or bolster the case for action.  Such appeals are used to convince citizens that threats to individual or social wellbeing may be avoided only if specific steps are taken. These panics are intense public, political, and academic responses to the emergence or use of media or technologies, especially by the young. Moral panic is a model or a theory which seeks to explain the complex phenomenon of social reaction . It was initially a sociological term coined by Stanley Cohen in his seminal work on the public reaction to the clashed between Mods and Rockers in the1960s. It includes three essential elements: 1. Society 2. A group seen as deviating from society’s norms, 3. The mediator between the two is the media. **** To do this requires ‘Deviancy Amplification’ **** ‘Deviancy amplification’ – Selective attention of crime control agencies, news and public concern on particular aspects of perceived and real increases in deviance = MORAL PANIC. Technopanic is moral panic applied to new technologiesulate 1. Focuses on new media forms; 2. Pathologises young people’s use of this media; 3. Cultural anxiety leads to attempts to regulate young people’s behaviour....