Avoiding the Danger Zone of Media Effects

In today’s world of cinematography, violent movies appear to be the latest rage. Some people may believe that these movies, such as “Saving Private Ryan”, are the reason for parts of our society’s vicious behavior. Others may choose to believe that people viewing these violent films do indeed have the power to ignore brutal actions shown and refuse to let them influence their life decisions.

I completed a study in W. James Potter’s text, Media Literacy. In this exercise, I learned how media effects (a violent movie) would influence the probability of the effect actually happening. To analyze this, I had to take into consideration Potter’s list of 13 factors.

I began by selecting a factor that best described how I could commit aggressive behaviors simply by watching “Saving Private Ryan.” The sociological factor concludes that “people who have been socialized with consistent norms for a long period of time will have a relatively weighty risk set point.” This means that if I have grown up with a poor background, watching the fierce actions that take place in “Saving Private Ryan” will likely cause me to enter into an aggressive state of behavior.

Now, I have not been raised with a tough background of any kind, but I noticed that after watching the movie I became very irritated about the whole idea of World War II. Throughout the movie, I wanted bad things to happen to the Germans when they killed any of the American soldiers.

A factor special to a type of effect that I used to see how I could be affected by the violence in this film was called “states.” This means that if I am in a current state of frustration and I view “Saving Private Ryan”, or any violent movie, I am apt to commit an act of aggression. When I last watched this film, I do not think I was angry prior to viewing it. Had I been upset before wathing this horrifying movie, I probably would have been more irritated than I was after watching the movie in a normal state of mind.

To my defense, there are factors stating that I may not act aggressively after watching a violent movie. The Personal locus factor determines a person’s media exposure habits. I would say that I have a strong personal locus because I am aware of the effects process of violent films. When watching “Saving Private Ryan”, there were many effects that I did not want to include in my personal behavior and so I made risk set points for the effects that were far from the manifestation point.

At the conclusion of this study, I realized that I am hardly influenced by the brutal actions in “Saving Private Ryan” or violent films in general. After reading the other 10 factors, I am mostly convinced that my chances of behaving violently are not great, especially after I applied them to my maturity, skills, knowledge structures, sociological factors, and lifestyle.