Article Summaries

Violent Video Games: The Effects on Youth, and Public Policy Implications

After reading Violent Video Games: The Effects on Youth, and Public Policy Implications it’s only clear that violent video games do increase the risk of aggression in children, teenagers, and adults. Video games are a great way of gaining a child’s attention and teaching them the contents that are included in the video game itself. This can be both a positive outcome and negative depending on the content that is included in the game. For example, an educational video game will give far more positive results than a game that is full of shooting other people. As video games developed, the higher the risk was for children that were playing violent video games. At one point the FBI thought that they had linked school shootings to children that were often playing violent video games. There is a lot of research currently being done on individuals that play violent video games such as experimental, correlational studies, and longitudinal studies. All of these different studies came back with the same results; violent video games do lead to aggressiveness. According to the text there is nothing that is being done about these issues. Congress has had their meetings, but overall they’ve decided that there are much bigger issues in the world. 

Weinstein, Taratino, and the standoff over movie violence

Harvey Weinstein once said “They have a point. You have to look in the mirror, too. I have to choose movies that aren’t violent, or as violent as they used to be. I know for me personally, you know, I can’t continue to do that. The change starts here. It has already. For me, I can’t do it. I can’t make one movie and say, ‘This is what I want for my kids,’ and then just go out and be a hypocrite.” This statement was a bold move that actor Harvey Weinstein stated on CNN about his opinion on media violence. This was brave considering how popular violent movies have gotten. Most people thought Weinstein was just saying this to get attention. Why is it that media violence is so appealing to individuals? Researchers think it’s the excitement of the movie that makes them more popular. Since the rise of media violence has occurred, the rates of homicides have actually decreased over the past 20 to 25 years, whereas the gun popularity has increased tremendously. Now how more guns are being bought but less homicides are taking place I don’t fully understand. But this article was interesting in how Weinstein made it public that he did not agree with media violence. 

Columbine: Whose Fault Was It?

Marilyn Manson is one person I never really paid attention to. However, in this article he really stood out to me as a person that just really gets to the point. Manson talks about how dumbfounded society is, and how humans feed off the gruesome and disgusting aspects of life. I never really thought about it as much, but after reading this article I realized that Manson is right. Humans enjoy reading and watching the bad events that go on in today’s society rather than to do something about them. We find the entertainment of hearing about school shootings and we like to determine why someone is wrong in a homicide investigation. So who’s fault is it? The person’s for doing the wrong? Or us because we just sitting back and watching the news, feeding off of the bad that happens in the world? This really struck my thoughts about today’s society, I found this article to be extremely interesting.