The Spectacle of Terror Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Spectacle of Terror - Essay Example Now a day, violence on television has become concrete representation of class conflict in the society. The easy accessibility to the media technology helped quickly revealing many significant events across the country. For instance, the police trial and consequent unrest in Los Angeles, the Rodney King beating, and the 9/11, together with the alarming revelation of the country’s vulnerability towards international terrorist attacks. The media has become an integral part of the real and essential assemblies of various social institutions like, hospitals, schools, political, administrative and military systems, even in religions. The media has the power to lead gathering and transmitting news, advertising, conducting campaigns. In the same way, there is a widely accepted belief that â€Å"those who make the headlines have the power.† Moreover, the media plays significant role for successfully conducting and executing wars, educational programs, entertainment, and socializ ation. The influences the media have on such social enterprises are legitimate points for evaluating the impacts of saturation too. Even though the general individual homicide rates in U.S. have been steady for many years, there is an increase in the number of school-aged children towards homicidal attitudes. Since 1980s, there have been a sudden rise in the gun-related homicides among the teens and several publicized murders have taken place in schools making the issue too complicated to handle. The violence among youth is attributed to the permutation of various factors, which impede their emotional ad social developments. Obviously, visual media has played a great role in creating such drastic situation. Today, visual media has become an invasive element of American family life, and symbolic violence illustrated in such medium has become a significant social issue. Therefore, such obvious revelation underlines the question of media’s ability to form awareness and attitude within the mass, especially the youth. We find it too hard to form counterbalancing factors to the violent death themes exemplified by the media. Moreover, the ability to discrete between fantasy and reality is very less in the children, adversely affecting them by creating misconception of death in their mind. Hence, consequences are getting enlarged in an age of media modernization, expansion, and saturation. When the media content is in progress with technology and culture, it influences the method in which reality is comprehended. The modern perceptive and assessment of violence at the hands of government representatives and terrorists are customized and memorized by the present media technologies. In the same way, visual media often undergoes a phenomenon called â€Å"disaster marathons,† days and weeks of intense and continuous media coverage of massive tragedies such as, the 9/11 and its aftermath. In the opinion of Fischoff (2005), it creates all kind of possible dest ructive consequences on viewers and on journalists’ ethics due to the emotionally saturated over coverage of these traumatizing events. Undoubtedly, the media passes on entertainment and related diversions to all segments of people. The foremost audio-visual medium that