Something Quite Atrocious

It’s a lousy argument that completely misses the point entirely. 

Cultivation theory, at it’s baseline, doesn’t say that consuming, say, violent media makes you wanna kill or hurt people. What cultivation theory IS is saying “the proliferation of excessive violent media can influence how the people who consume that media perceive about the world” ie a person with already violent tendencies might be more likely to act on those violent tendencies because, due to the sheer glut of violent media, violence might seem more acceptable than it actually is culturally. 

And this shit is subconscious, you can’t say you’re not affected by it because “you know the difference between fiction and reality”, because often time you don’t actively register that it IS influencing you. Or, in the case of many ads, you do know it’s trying to influence you and you put up guard walls - but that burger on screen DOES look delicious and the Burger King is only down the road so why not grab something to eat? The decline of sharks due to Jaws is people perceiving the sharks as inherently dangerous to human and, thus, to keep people safe, need to be culled. The rise of the KKK in the late 1910′s and early 20′s was due to Birth of a Nation portraying the KKK as sympathetic and cool. The decline of the KKK in the 40s can be attributed to their mocking portrayal Superman radio serials. This shit all matters.

 Hello baby!

Sorry for not making an immediate response but I want tomake sure I got you some reliable information. At NYU, I am a digital mediacommunications major so we closely observe all forms of media.

So as content creators we can prevent ourselvesfrom creating harmful media.

So as content consumers, we can discern what isharmful media and how to filter what is reliable/healthy information/content.

So here I’ve provided someimportant links where you can find more information about this subject and learn more about the state of current literature on the matter.

This short journal highlights theimpact of media on adolescents and children. This is important because earlycognitive psychosocial development before the age of 21 shapesthe way an individual uses and responds to media.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2792691/

This article discusses the negativeinfluences of media and elements of how media can be harmful to us in thedigital age. This includes blind imitation, a compromised moral code (right andwrong dilemma), and blurred lines/confusion between fantasy and fiction.

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/negative-influences-of-media.html

This book details the power of media to shape socialrealities and the effects of media on behavior, attitude, beliefs, and culture.  They also provide stats on the affect ofmedia on households, etc.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KnQXQOP5uoMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA69&dq=media+affects+reality&ots=SXvUpShviO&sig=FLJSjxHBN72JPhouttvjsCSvJvE#v=onepage&q=media%20affects%20reality&f=false

This is an official nursing website that states that thereis CURRENTLY NOT A DEBATE in the MEDICAL COMMUNITY ABOUT THE EFFECT OF media ONPEOPLE. The public health community, especially the psychiatric andpsychological community, unanimously believe that the effects of media (allforms) is potent in affecting a person’s perception of reality.

http://www.truthaboutnursing.org/faq/media_affects_thinking.html

CONCLUSION: The medical, media, and social scientists are ata consensus.

FICTION DOES AFFECT REALITY.

I hope that these were helpful to you doll.

If you need anymore links are interested in one aspectspecifically, let me know. I’ll see if I can dig up something from my scholarlyreadings.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140311205846/https://www.buzzle.com/articles/negative-influences-of-media.html

Here’s another good article about fiction:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-good-for-you-how-fiction-changes-your-world/nubDy1P3viDj2PuwGwb3KO/story.html

Quoting some of it:

This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

Moreover, it’s clear that these stories really can change our views. As the psychologist Raymond Mar writes, “Researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fictional] narrative.” For example, studies reliably show that when we watch a TV show that treats gay families nonjudgmentally (say, “Modern Family”), our own views on homosexuality are likely to move in the same nonjudgmental direction. History, too, reveals fiction’s ability to change our values at the societal level, for better and worse. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped bring about the Civil War by convincing huge numbers of Americans that blacks are people, and that enslaving them is a mortal sin. On the other hand, the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” inflamed racist sentiments and helped resurrect an all but defunct KKK.

So those who are concerned about the messages in fiction — whether they are conservative or progressive — have a point. Fiction is dangerous because it has the power to modify the principles of individuals and whole societies.

For a long time literary critics and philosophers have argued, along with the novelist George Eliot, that one of fiction’s main jobs is to “enlarge men’s sympathies.” Recent lab work suggests they are right. The psychologists Mar and Keith Oatley tested the idea that entering fiction’s simulated social worlds enhances our ability to connect with actual human beings. They found that heavy fiction readers outperformed heavy nonfiction readers on tests of empathy, even after they controlled for the possibility that people who already had high empathy might naturally gravitate to fiction. As Oatley puts it, fiction serves the function of “making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding.”

Follow-up studies have reached similar conclusions. For example, one study showed that small children (age 4-6) who were exposed to a large number of children’s books and films had a significantly stronger ability to read the mental and emotional states of other people. Similarly, Washington & Lee psychologist Dan Johnson recently had people read a short story that was specifically written to induce compassion in the reader. He wanted to see not only if fiction increased empathy, but whether it would lead to actual helping behavior. Johnson found that the more absorbed subjects were in the story, the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt, the more likely the subjects were to help when the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens — highly absorbed readers were twice as likely to help out. “In conclusion,” Johnson writes, “it appears that ‘curling up with a good book’ may do more than provide relaxation and entertainment. Reading narrative fiction allows one to learn about our social world and as a result fosters empathic growth and prosocial behavior.”

Similarly, novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and John Gardner have contended that fiction is morally beneficial, and here, too, research is bearing them out. While fiction often dwells on lewdness, depravity, and simple selfishness, storytellers virtually always put us in a position to judge wrongdoing, and we do so with gusto. As the Brandeis literary scholar William Flesch argues, fiction all over the world is strongly dominated by the theme of poetic justice. Generally speaking, goodness is endorsed and rewarded and badness is condemned and punished. Stories — from modern films to ancient fairy tales — steep us all in the same powerful norms and values. True, antiheroes, from Milton’s Satan to Tony Soprano, captivate us, but bad guys are almost never allowed to live happily ever after. And fiction generally teaches us that it is profitable to be good.

Take a study of television viewers by the Austrian psychologist Marcus Appel. Appel points out that, for a society to function properly, people have to believe in justice. They have to believe that there are rewards for doing right and punishments for doing wrong. And, indeed, people generally do believe that life punishes the vicious and rewards the virtuous. But one class of people appear to believe these things in particular: those who consume a lot of fiction.

In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place.

This is despite the fact, as Appel puts it, “that this is patently not the case.” As people who watch the news know very well, bad things happen to good people all the time, and most crimes go unpunished. In other words, fiction seems to teach us to see the world through rose-colored lenses. And the fact that we see the world that way seems to be an important part of what makes human societies work.

Our survey respondents reacted to the characters as though they were real people: They admired the protagonists, disliked the antagonists, felt happy when the good guys succeeded, and felt sad or angry when they were threatened. By simulating a world where antisocial behavior is strongly condemned and punished, these novels were promoting ancient human values. And from these books, and from fiction more broadly, readers learn by association that if they are more like the protagonists, they’ll be more likely to live happily ever after.

Fiction is often treated like a mere frill in human life, if not something worse. But the emerging science of story suggests that fiction is good for more than kicks. By enhancing empathy, fiction reduces social friction. At the same time, story exerts a kind of magnetic force, drawing us together around common values. In other words, most fiction, even the trashy stuff, appears to be in the public interest after all.

…and another:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160213205630/https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?_r=1

Quotes:

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

Listen, an artist drawing something is a form of expression yes, but it is also a form of communication. You’re not just showing when you draw, you’re telling. And when all you draw is incest/child porn/rape/whatever, it’s very telling to those who actually perpetrate these real life crimes that what they do is looked upon with a good eye, that its normal, and accepted. 

-Existing child pornography may be used to desensitize children and normalize sexual activity in an effort by offenders to engage in sexual abuse or create new child pornography. -Child pornography can be the gateway to hands-on child sexual abuse, or may be used by sex offenders to reduce their inhibitions and prepare themselves to offend.

Just because it’s drawn does not make it free game. It’s called simulated child pornography, and while the legality of it is still a toss up in most places, the impact is the same.

And ignoring that huge, blaring picture? What really is your argument on drawing child porn. Look at what you drew, maybe imagine it with REAL children and REAL adults and please tell me any argument you might have that makes it okay other than “I can draw what I want”. Especially when an adult character and is aged down to be a child. There is no argument there at all, no “oh they look young in the original media”. You wanted to see a child in a sexual situation, plain and simple. That’s what people see. That’s what victims see. That’s what abusers see. That’s what future abusers see.