SOC 1500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: School Violence

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1500
• Professor: Stephanie Howells

Document Summary

Media effects: during the course of their daily lives, people have direct contact with only a small sector of the physical and social environment. They work in the same setting, travel the same routes, visit the same places, and see the same sets of friends and associates. Consequently, their conceptions of social reality are greatly influenced by vicarious experiences by what they see, hear and read without direct experiential correctives. To a large extent, people act on their images of reality. The more people"s images of reality depend on the media"s symbolic environment, the greater is its social impact . Violence on tv an 11 year old has seen 100,000 acts of tv brutality (not including news) Signorelli (1994) violence featured in 63% of primetime network programs (average 5 incidents/hour) Most research shows a correlation between crime and media violence but research can not demonstrate whether violence on screens leads to violence in real life.