Effects of Violence within Media

This is a very big topic that we discussed in the lecture today and it has been very controversial throughout the media from past to present. The session started with the display of some movieclips of violent acts found in many movies and video games. These sort of movies and video games are often considered as murder simulator but there are other controversial thoughts in the defence of these media products. Violent movies like Alien, Natural born killers and Men behind the sun, and violent video games like Mortal Kombat, God of war 3 and Fallout 3 are thought to be capable of inflicting the act of violence among the youngsters that watch these movies or play these games.

Mortal Kombat

Alien

Outrageous violent acts such as school shoot-outs are blamed enormously as an influence from games and cinema. One of these incidents was a high school shoot-out in America where the shooter admitted that he was obsessed the game called "Doom" (a first person shooter game with violent contents). Also "Wild Boys of London" is a very controversial publication that was considered to have caused a lot of fear on young men and corrupt their mind irreplaceably. So even in the old days of media, controversies about social violence emerged from these products.

However, many experts believe that the violence in the video games and movies are for entertainment purpose  only and they do not have direct and immediate effect on the viewers of players. Those who do commit violent crimes and blame it on films and games are just using it as excuse and they are likely to commit these crimes with or without these movies and games. Many experiments have also done to support this statement. For example, in certain Universities, students were given a game with violent contents to play and then the same game was let to be played by the students but this time they took out the violent contents and replaced them with non-violent content. The results came out as the excitement level in the students remained the same meaning that violence included in games do not influence one's desire for violence.

Violence and video games are also related in different manner in the field of modern technology. Video game consoles come with the gaming controllers which are designed to be small, easy to use and fit perfectly on average size of hands. This concept was taken and implemented in the modern military where the soldiers can use a controller similar to the video games controller to easily use the remote controlled weapons like guided missiles and RC car with explosives and spy camera attached to it.

Symbols

A symbol is anything that represents something by convention or association. Usually it a written or printed sign that is used to represent something. Symbols are important part of human communication specially among the literate communities. A symbol that has been learnt to represent a certain specific object or activity by a community makes people within the community to communicate without even having to be present with each other. One can simply leave of note in symbols and others would understand what he/she is trying to tell.

For instance, this cave painting was printed many many years ago by our ancestors and although they are no longer present among us, leaving this symbol has helped us understand what they used to do (such as hunting what kind of animals and using what kind of weapons to hunt). Thus, the use of symbols can help us communicate even long after we die.

Symbols can be created using the resemblance and these kind of symbols are more obvious and easier to understand even for those people who have not learnt the symbol. For example, the following image shows two symbols where the left symbol represents female while the right symbol represents male. These are quiet obvious and easy to understand as the female symbol shows a clear resemblance of a general female clothing and male symbol shows a clear resemblance of a general male clothing.

But some symbols are arbitrary and do not show any resemblance. These symbols are created and generalised and people to learn it and keep the symbol and whatever it represents in memory. For example, in English language, the word "tree" represents a real life tree although this combination of letters does not resemble the tree in any form and does not relate to the actual tree whatsoever.

Icons are the specific type of symbols. Icons are created more due to the resemblance and likeness and are very different from words, letters and scripts. The above image is a fine example of icons. These icons (symbols of female and male) are created and used due to their resemblance in appearance with the actual objects (female and male human genders) they represent.

Two sides to everything

Today I missed my Media Histories and Cultures Lecture because I was feeling a bit sick. But with the help of internet and my friends who managed to attend the lecture, I was able to gain some understandings from today's topic. And it was about "Two sides to everything".

From what I have understood, it means that everything in the world has a different side to it to counter it. For example, black colour has white to counter, good has evil to counter, male has female to counter, fat has skinny to counter, dark has light to counter and so on.

Everything having two sides helps us to create a contrast between them and distinguish between things. If there were just days and nights did not exist, we would not even know about the days. So, in order to identify the days we needed to know the existence of nights as nights are the other side of the days that creates a contrast between themselves and helps us distinguish between them.

Understanding this topic is definitely beneficial to my course study as in Digital Animation, we often have to make certain things stand out from the rest where creating the contrast by showing the two sides can be handy.