Moral Panics

Over the years, the media to some has become a primary source to blame for many of the moral panics seen on the news throughout the past couple of years, and in this week’s lecture and seminar we took a look at how this could actually be true or not.

News articles are a prime example of this as over the years people have used news articles as a primary and trustworthy source of discovering what has been happening locally and over the world.  However sometimes media outlets can sometimes exaggerate on some stories, sometimes in order to create more publicity therefore more readers. A more modern example of this is the news outlets portrayal of video games, sometimes using video games as an easy way out for journalists to use and manipulating parents into thinking that video games are the cause for a lot of violent acts that have occurred. A more recent example is the 2012 ‘Sandy Hook Shooting’ where many journalists would blame video games as the primary cause of the shooting, even other instances of mass murder the media has used video games as a prime suspect behind it all including the 2012 Aurora shooting where journalists claimed the shooter was an avid player of video games before the shooting occurred. However it has later been revealed that there was no indication that video games would be the influence behind the shooting. While it could be argued that video games such as ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto’ can be seen as suspects in violent real life acts, but that is why products like that have a rating system, similar to the film industry giving people more of an idea of what themes are actually in the games. Interestingly it’s even been researched since video games as a whole has no negative effect on the brain, “during the years in which video games soared in popularity, youth violence has declined to 40-year lows. And while it’s natural, in such an emotional time, for people to search desperately for answers, that often results in misinformation.”[1]

This unfortunate trend has been a consistent theme from the media for decades across all forms of media, from music, films and comic books this exploitation is seen as a way to make people read their headlines and watch their show or read their newspaper without even thinking about the other issues that are seen around these unfortunate events. And one of the worse things about this is teenagers being blamed as the culprits behind these attacks, blatantly giving parents and other adults a primary demographic to blame on as we all know that video games today have a large fan base that consists of teenagers. They have even gone on to be referred to as ‘Folk Devils’ by the likes of Stanley Cohen, “Young delinquents are far from unique in being associated with violence, and no one type of youthful deviant has been constructed entirely like any other, still “these groups have occupied a constant position as folk devils in moral panics”[2]

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[1] Ferguson, C. (2012). Sandy Hook Shooting: Video Games Blamed, Again. Available: http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/20/sandy-hook-shooting-video-games-blamed-again/. Last accessed 10th May 2015.

[2] Krinsky, C (2008). Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth. Northeastern University: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p2.
[3] Image:  https://andyluke.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/ban-these-evil-games.png?w=730
[4}  TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit . (2012). Tragedy and Video Game Violence . [Online Video]. 19 December. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uwAo8lcAC4. [Accessed: 11 May 2015].

Privacy

Privacy has always been an important issue and with the rise of the internet and social networking. Privacy has later gone on to become a topic of great controversy due to most people being easily exploited on the internet. Credit card details, home address and personal information are all put online nowadays, if that is to purchase shopping online or creating a social network account. All this information is now available online for anyone with computer knowledge to exploit. All this information you give away however is monitored as is your internet history. While some may argue that could be an invasion of your privacy to an extreme level, it’s difficult to deny that it is good that there are professionals out there who are monitoring people’s online history to help search out for people who aim to exploit others by hacking into their personal information and using it for their own gain without permission. As is stated "Any personal information can be sensitive information" (Acquisti, 2013)

Privacy as a whole has an overall ‘Big Brother’ vibe about it. The thought of everything you do is being watched by someone who is trying to keep you safe, with around 5.9 million CCTV camera's currently in operation in the UK. This in my opinion is a solid way of keeping an eye on people at all time but there is a certain voyeuristic feel about them, a sense that someone is keeping an eye out on you, and while I wouldn’t like it to reach George Orwell’s ‘1984’ depiction of privacy invasion, I do personally appreciate the fact that people do have an eye kept on them, but I do believe that sometimes security should understand that sometimes people would rather have some of their personal information kept private, “The only restrictions to what technology can do are ethical or legal, and in the absence of those it is crucial to understand people’s privacy concerns.”

In my opinion I do believe that today privacy is seen more as an optional approach compared to years prior, mainly due to the rise of Smartphone’s, the internet and social media. A lot of outlets today such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at least give people the option of giving their details themselves and gives options on how private your profile can be. A problem with this especially when it comes to Smartphone’s, much of your data will be uploaded to the cloud giving hackers free range of your photos and video’s if they were able to gain access to it; this same instance has been a constant problem over the years with celebrities getting their personal pictures released online.

Overall I do believe that is important for people to have an option with privacy, some may find the constant voyeurism may come as a turn off when it comes to creating accounts online and while in some aspects I can sympathize with those people but in my opinion I believe it is a necessity as you never know who actually can gain access to this data.

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Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2014). How much do we care about our online privacy? . Available: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/nov/10/online-privacy-digital-trust-psychology. Last accessed 9th May 2015.

  TED. (2013). Alessandro Acquisti: Why privacy matters . [Online Video]. 18 October. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_pqhMO3ZSY. [Accessed: 10 May 2015].



Image: http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/7640/laws-and-regulations/skype-apple-too-many-doubts-about-the-privacy.html

Advertising

As for this week’s topic we looked at the impact that advertising has had on our lives and how it has gone on to become a necessity for companies to use as a kind of sales pitch of sorts to remind people that this product is out there and available to buy.

Over the years the use of advertising has been a difficult to define. While some may argue that advertising is a good investment due to its impact on the economy, while others think it is a bad one due to its oversaturation in the media today with the use of billboards, television and the internet.

While I do believe that it could be argued that the market is becoming more saturated, I do however believe that the use of advertising has become an important staple in the media today as people can nowadays get a better idea of what is actually available out there and giving customers the option on which product you place the most trust in due to it’s what could be possibly seen as a quite manipulative way of gaining your money.

Even today advertising as a whole has adapted in a way in order to make sure wherever you go some kind of sales pitch will be put in front of you, the primary source being Smartphone’s, “Our phones become a portable place to consume content and record data, devices to make payments, store mobile coupons, keep tickets on. They become our most portable interface with the world”. With most things being digital nowadays it’s easy for companies to take full advantage of consumers as everything on your Smartphone from in game adds to social networking websites such as ‘Facebook’.

One of the more controversial aspects of advertising for some is the way that companies can sometimes demean their customers through the use of advertising. Take many of the perfume adverts that we see today that feature actress’s such as ‘Miss Dior’ which features Hollywood actress Natalie Portman. The overall vibe of the advert is trying to convey a sense of beauty and basically telling consumers that if they were to buy this product they will also have the sophistication that Ms Portman has throughout the ad, while also claiming that currently, without the product they will never reach the same level of beauty, “This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful”. (Long and Wall, 2012, pp 173) The same could also be said for other products. Take cleaning utensils for example, ‘Cillit Bang’ has a very special way of gathering your attention, by being more forward (and to some annoying) about its products claiming to be “revolutionary” very aggressively while also giving examples by showing how quickly it can remove stains compared to other stain removers that are on the market, quickly showing consumers which product is the best one to buy gaining the customers trust straight away.

While advertising could be seen as annoying to some I do believe that they do have a lasting impact on people, giving them more options on what is actually available out there.




Bibliography:

Tom Goodwin. (2014). Welcome to the future of advertising, where the word digital is redundant. Available: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/dec/18/future-advertising-digital-media-technology. Last accessed 8th May 2015.

“ Consumer Society and Advertising,” in Long, P.; Wall, T; Bakir, V. & McStay, A. Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. London: Pearson Education. P.173

Dior image: http://www.derbyhotels.com/blog/en/miss-dior-exhibition-in-paris/

InsaneNutter. (2007). Cillit Bang Advert 1. [Online Video]. 17 April. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrMD_z_FnNk. [Accessed: 09 May 2015].