Audience Responses to Real Media Violence

Mary Grace Antony is assistant professor of communication studies at the Schreiner University.

• Part I – How We Respond to Media ViolenceChapter 1 – When violence is real (not reel)Chapter 2 – Emotional responses to media charactersChapter 3 – Moral disengagement and enjoying media violencePart II – How Audiences Respond to Real Media ViolenceChapter 4 – Measuring responses to real media violenceChapter 5 – Realism, rationalization, and rejectionChapter 6 – This feeling is based on actual eventsChapter 7 – Boys don’t cry… but do girls?Part III – So What?Chapter 8 – Understanding how we watch real violenceChapter 9 – Why we should care

This book summarizes quantitative assessments of student reactions to watching videos of an activity called (among other things) the 'knockout game,' in which adults are physically attacked by other adults for the 'entertainment' of the aggressors. As Antony explains, the videos of these events are usually provided on the Internet by the attackers or someone who sympathizes with them. Antony finds that audience responses suggest a new type of desensitization toward mass media violence and its depicted victims. In the last of book's nine chapters, 'Why We Should Care,' the author observes that contemporary audiences expect 'vivid brutality and gorgeous spectacle' from both fiction and nonfiction portrayals of violence. The book challenges some established conceptual frameworks—such as affective disposition theory—about the impact of media violence . . . This carefully written study, with its comprehensive bibliography, will be valuable to those interested in mass communication, including television, and film research. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professsionals.