Video Games and Violence
I think that this was a good topic to discuss in regards to media. I think that many people complain about the video games children are playing and how that can cause them to be violent. I have never really believed that to be true and I think that chapter 5 in Sternheimer’s book really validated my opinion on it. The chapter states “Homicide rates are at there lowest levels in nearly five decades. between 1992 ad 2010, the homicide rate fell by almost half… homicide offending rate for teens fourteen to seventeen fell by 71 percent between 1993 and 2000 and has been flat ever since.” I think that this goes to prove that violence is decreasing, especially among teens. Even though there are still cases of teen crime, it is not as prevalent as it use to be. So like I said I don’t think that video games are the only ones to blame here. Children are going to behave by example and I don’t think that playing a video game would alter these children enough for them to become violent. Rather I believe that children are going to behave like the people they are surrounded with. Such as family and friends. Also in the article we read online it stated “It is now estimated that by the end of elementary school, the average child will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on the TV screen.” Although this statistic might be true I do think that it has a lot to do with what is on the news. They say that children will see this amount of crime in their time just in elementary school but honestly isn’t that the main thing the news is showing. Like we read in the articles last week the news has a pretty warped view on what is really going on in the world. So maybe children wouldn’t have access to this large number of murders if the media would choose to focus on something else. So I do not necessarily think that these acts of crime they see are due to video games. Overall, I think that this article and chapter 5 both did a good job giving examples of how violence is connected within the media.
