Media Effects - An age old debate

Researcher Leonard Eron estimated at a 1993 conference that 10% of violence in the USA was due to television

Had he looked back past the birth of television, he might have seen similar claims about film in a 1933 report by Blumer and Hauser who found that ‘motion pictures created attitudes and furnished techniques conducive to delinquent and criminal behaviour.’

Further back, he might have referred to the 1888 Punch attribution of crimes in Whitechapel to ‘highly coloured pictorial advertisements’ to an 1841 Inspectors of Prisons report claiming that theatres, if not corrupting the mind, ‘tend to its vitiation by familiarising it with scenes of grossness, crime and blood’; or to a 1776 claim by Hanway that newspapers and amusements were to blame for ‘the host of thieves which has of late invaded us.’

Can we take it, then, that a society free of television sets, cinema screens and the printing press* was safe from media effects? Apparently not! Socrates worried about the possible effects of the discovery of the alphabet and he wrote nothing, though reading and writing had been widespread in Athens, at least for administrative purposes, for over 100 years by the time of his birth in about 470 B.C.

Compiled from http://www.theory.org.uk/effec-tg.htm
This article is copyright © Tom Gormley, 1998

Type of source: Secondary popular

Benefits of source:
- Has a bibliography, which suggests it's quite academic, and also allows me to follow up the links
- Strong argument on the against side of the debate

Limitations of source:
- Not by a recognised author (About this article: Tom Gormley lives in Dublin and sent me this paper which, he says, "I wrote as an assignment for a distance-learning MA in January 1998, which you might find amusing". It's good. )