DONT BLAME THE INTERNET FOR VIOLENCE AS ENTERTAINMENT

HERE IS A LIST OF REASONS AS TO WHY I BELIEVE THAT ALTHOUGH THE INTERNET MAKES VIOLENCE AS ENTERTAINMENT MORE ACCESSIBLE, IT IS NOT THE ROOT CAUSE FOR VIOLENT ENTERTAINMENT'S POPULARITY.

I HAVE FURTHER EXPLAINED SOME OF THESE REASONS IN POSTS BELOW

• Violence has been used as entertainment since humans first started keeping records. It has been used in myths & legends, as public sacrfices, at the colloseums of Rome, in ancient Egyptian plays that retold tales of murder. Today public executions still take place infront of thousands of eager onlookers.
• Vladimir Prop believed that violence should have a place in all plays.
• Humans often have a fascination for taboo and things that are deemed as morally wrong. Big fusses are always made about banned books and films such as "A Clockwork Orange," "The Exorcist" and "The Last House On The Left."
• The internet is one of the only ways in which people are granted the freedom of speech. If we were to take violent footage off of it, we would end up censoring everything and this could lead to a 1984 society.
• We have an individual responsibility to be aware of offensive material on the net and steer clear from it. We shouldnt have to intervene to stop people from watching it.
• Humans have a natural desire to break boundaries- especially since the 1960's. Violence on the internet is there to shock, it is not necessarily any more harmful than that.
• If any form of media should be blamed for glorifying violence, it should be film and television. The amount of brutality that we see through these forms of medium desensitize us and blur our reality/fiction perception.
• Consumerism & capitalism have made us into a selfish society where our lives are driven by the want for money, beauty and popularity. We become numb. Shocking entertainment kicks people in the teeth and reminds them about the world outside of the one that they live in.
• Not all violent footage is bad. People watch violence for many different reasons, only a very small percentage watch real violence for light-hearted entertainment.
• Some humans have an innate fascination with violence. If we ban violence on the internet, they may look for it elsewhere which could have far worse consequences.
• Lad's magazines glorify violence by suggesting that it is macho to gain pleasure from looking at it.

NOT ALL VIOLENCE OR HORRIFIC FOOTAGE IS BAD

Vietnam and Cambodia have seen some of the worst atrocities that have ever happened. Millions of people in these countries were brutally killed and murdered in the Vietnam War and also in the Khmer Rouge’s dictatorship regime. The museums that are dedicated to the country’s violent history are completely uncensored and the images that they have on display are as graphic as anything you would find on the internet. I saw these images by choice, and so did many other people. But we did not view them from morbid fascination; we wanted to see them to form some idea of what the people of these country’s had been through, to form a better idea of what happened to the people, and to ensure that the victims of these awful crimes were remembered. Although I found the images upsetting and sickening, I wanted to know. I didn’t want to be ignorant. Viewing violent images does not necessarily have to be something to be condemned.

BLURRING REALITY

If any form of media is to blame for glorifying violence, then I believe this should be television. Through TV and film we see brutal stabbings, suffocations, rape, poisoning, shootings, torture and various other fictional footage that are deemed as violent every single day. We don’t think twice about them. Seeing fictional footage of violence desensitizes us and the line between reality and fiction blurs. This means that when we see real grotesque footage on the internet, our brain refuses to believe it is real. This is why some people can look at horrific websites showing real corpses and be un-phased. This is also why other people find real images of violence on the internet impenetrably sadistic, because their reality lines have not been so blurred.

THE INTERNET IS A SCAPEGOAT FOR THE BLAME OF VIOLENCE AS ENTERTAINMENT. SO WHERE SHOULD THE BLAME REALLY LIE?

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CENSORSHIP/PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.” A. Whitney Griswold

"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real. Somewhere in their upbringing they were shielded against the total facts of our experience. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.” Charles Bukowski

"Censorship always protects and perpetuates every horror of the prevailing forms of oppression. With us, its subtle disguises increase its evils by creating delusions of safety, liberty and democracy. It precludes that intelligence which is necessary to hasten wholesome and natural social evolution.” Theodore Schroeder

If we were to start censoring explicit images of a violent nature, would we not be infringing on human rights? If violence happens, why should we play ignorant and not allow people to view it online if they so wish? Does ignorance automatically give us more moral high-ground than acknowledging that violence exists and some humans have a fascination with it?

Youtube is one of the websites which gets the most blame for violence being made and viewed for entertainment purposes. However, even this website has a strict guideline or what it does and does not tolerate:

1. YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it's a video of yourself, don't post it on YouTube. Also, be advised that we work closely with law enforcement and we report child exploitation. Please read our Safety Tips and stay safe on YouTube.
2. Don't post videos showing bad stuff like animal abuse, drug abuse, or bomb making.
   Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it.
3. Youtube is not a shock site. Don't post gross-out videos of accidents, dead bodies and similar things.
4. We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech, which is content intended to attack or demean a particular gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, ethnic origin, veteran status, color, age, disability or nationality.
5. There is zero tolerance for predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, invading privacy, or the revealing of other members' personal information. Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube.
6. You may not like everything you see. Some of the content here may offend you—if you find that it violates our Terms of Use, then click "Flag as Inappropriate" under the video you're watching to submit it for review by YouTube staff. If it doesn't, then consider just clicking on something else—why waste time watching videos you don't like?
   
   Human beings are the most socially and intellectually intelligent creatures to have ever graced the planet. Do we not at least have a personal responsibility to stay aware from offensive internet footage? Are we so incapable of self-control that we would have to go to the extreme of banning websites?What would happen if we did start censoring certain websites and images that contained violent images? Who would decide where the boundary lies between the acceptable and the unacceptable? Wouldn’t we start to live in a ‘1984’ society where freedom of speech and freedom of thought no longer exists and every member of society has to think like the state wants them to?

Violence as entertainment throughout history

Violence has been a fascination for the human race since we first established ourselves on earth. The internet has not caused this problem, it could be argued that it is inherent in human nature to find violence entertaining. The earliest recordings of violence as a sport date back to the ancient greeks/egyptians/aztecs/incas and the romans who are probably the most notorious for this. The romans used gladiator fights (in which 50% of participants died), animal baiting (5000 animals met their bloody ends at the opening day of Rome's colloseum), and real death on stage to entertain upto 50,000 people."Don't forget, there's a big gladiator show coming up the day after tomorrow. Not the same old fighters either. They've got a fresh shipment in. There's not a slave in that batch. Just wait. There'll be cold steel for the crowd, no quarter and the amphitheatre will end up looking like a slaughterhouse. There's even a girl who fights from a chariot." Petronius in AD 60.
"The wild beast hunts, two a day for five days, are magnificent. There is no denying it..." Cicero in 50 BCViolence has continued as a form of entertainment ever since ancient civilisation. John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" which was first performed in 1614 was often slated by modern critics for it's excessive violence. Shakespeare's revenge tragedies such as "King Lear" and "Hamlet" revelled in eyeball gouging and limb losing. In modern theatre, Edward Bond's pre-digital era play "Saved" written in 1965 caused public outcry because of it's violent content. 'Saved' tells the story of youths, who, suppressed by a brutal economic system, become monsters."I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners," Edward Bond confessed. "Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence." In the middle-east, particularly in Iran & Iraq, criminals are still publicly tortured or hanged in front of large audiences. On August 15th a 16 year old girl was publicly hanged in Iran for her 'sharp tongue.' In 2002 it was thought as many as 5000 people watched 5 men who had been accused of rape being hanged from 2 cranes in Iran. Women are still publicly stoned to death for adultery. Although people might not go to view hangings for pure entertainment, there is still a morbid fascination with death and violence. This has been around long before the internet made violent images more accessible. I am not saying that it is right that people do view other people's pain as entertainment, I am simply stating that it would be very naive if we assummed that annhilating all violent images on the internet would lead to less violence being used as entertainment.

The argument that the internet does contribute towards violence as entertainment:

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Panorama Investigates

Children's Fight Club
By Raphael Rowe Panorama

This article has been taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6921555.stm

The police want websites to actively monitor their contentThe internet is without question one of the greatest inventions of our time. For the majority of users it's a great source of information - the good by far out-weighing the bad.
But the bad is becoming more and more of a concern.
When we first came across the hundreds of violent videos that had been uploaded to various websites, we were shocked by the senseless and excessive violence, the age of those involved and the lack of sympathy from those watching and those who used their mobile phones to film the incident and egg-on the attacker/s.
No matter how many videos I witnessed during our research I was shocked and flinched, and still do, at the impact of the blows that rained down on the victims. Be it by foot or fist or weapon.
Meeting and speaking to victims and their parents, like "Joe", from Glasgow in Scotland, who had no idea the assault on their son was on the internet for others' entertainment made our investigation all the more important.
Nobody complained
Joe had been bullied and assaulted by teenagers younger and smaller than him.
His story was one of many I heard:
"I couldn't run from them because they had knives and I was scared they would use them. They filmed the attack so that everyone at my school and people that lived in my area could see what they did to me."

Hayden HewittLiveLeakOver sixteen-hundred viewers watched his attackers taunt and punch him around the head on YouTube, the most successful video broadcast website. Yet no-one used the complaint system to have it taken down.
We did and it was removed.
Hayden Hewitt, the co-founder of LiveLeak, another site that allows its users to upload children fighting or attacking other kids, told me he would not take down the extremely violent videos we brought to his attention.
He told us: "Look all this is happening, this is real life, this is going on, we're going to show it"
When I went to see Google, who own YouTube, their spokesperson Rachel Whetstone told me it was up to the community who use the site to flag up something if they thought it was inappropriate.
YouTube would then decide if it breached its guidelines.
Google are worth more than $170bn. When I asked how many people they employ to actively monitor the content being uploaded to YouTube, I was, and I'm sure many will be, surprised to learn that no-one actively polices the site.
The police say this is not good enough and they want YouTube and other websites to actively police their content and forward details of those who upload violent footage so they can be investigated.
If they were prepared to do this it may reduce the bullying and attacks for entertainment on vulnerable children, like Joe, overnight.

Funded through advertising
We also investigated how the advertisements for blue-chip brands - including British Telecom, John Lewis, Carphone Warehouse and Orange - came to be splashed across an internet website called Pure Street Fights.
These and several other brands all insisted that they had no knowledge of the adverts' appearance on the site and have launched investigations.
Pure Street Fights, which features violent films of anything from vicious playground attacks to bare-knuckle boxing, is funded through its advertising.
Other brands to have appeared on the site are VirginMedia, O2, eBay, Easycar and Peugeot.
Michelle Elliott of Kidscape said: "It's outrageous. The only reason these sites are allowed to be up there is because somebody is paying money and the advertisers are paying money."
However, the brands have all told Panorama that they knew nothing of the adverts - and have since ensured that they have been taken down.
Almost all blamed rogue advertising networks for putting them onto the website. Both Carphone Warehouse and O2 have sacked the advertising networks responsible.
Guy Philpott of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents online advertising companies, said that brands were often not aware of where advertising networks were placing their adverts.
IPA Statement
When contacted by Panorama, The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) issued a statement.
He said: "This is pretty lamentable isn't it? They (the brands) don't understand what happened in the chain for them to end up on this site. Online advertising is a fairly new science, you know, and it's grown a lot in the last couple of years. And there is an education process to be done."
He said the IAB would be investigating the advertising networks in question.

BT said in a statement: "The advert in question was placed by one of the many networks that BT uses that act as advertising sales houses for thousands of websites.
"On the rare occasion that a network gets it wrong we will take immediate action. The advert in question was removed immediately it was brought to our attention. We take any breach of our guidelines extremely seriously and we are currently investigating with the network how this happened."
Carphone Warehouse said in a statement: "As part of our advertising strategy TalkTalk buy mass online advertising space on third party online advertising networks. Upon investigation, it transpires that one of our online advertising networks mistakenly advertised TalkTalk on Pure Street Fights due to a technical error on their part. This was a breach of contract and we immediately cancelled out contract with this network."

Our Group Manifesto

The Official Document.

Read More About Us Here:

We initially started to research the issue of racism, as we wanted to work on a topic that has affected many people and has been a problematic issue for many years. Although we felt this was still a dominant issue, we wanted to touch upon an area that the majority of people could relate to as well as something that stems directly from the module itself. We decided after much thought that racism may have been too specific as it only affected a particular group of people rather than all people in general.

From the onset, our seminar groups discussions have been heavily related to the Internet, in particular Facebook. With an increasing number of people joining Facebook, and the internet becoming more of a focal point in our lives, we aimed to explore this issue in more depth. The internet was our main influence for our final topic of discussion. We feel that the internet has taken the world by storm. It is a whole new world that gives ordinary people unrestricted access to completely uncensored information. We discussed positive and negative aspects of the Internet, as well as discussing the issues that have been made most public, controversial, and problematic. One of which was violence. The increase of violence in modern society has always been linked to the increase in violent shows on the media. Now, it appears that the internet is taking the blame as well. Street violence, especially gun violence in Britain is on the rise in the younger generations with teenagers being shot dead almost every week in large cities. Recently, Anthony Anderson was jailed for three years on account of ‘outraging public decency.’ He urinated on a dying woman whilst his friends filmed the footage and then claimed, “This is a youtube moment!” Is the internet to blame for his behaviour or are we just using the internet as a scapegoat for much deeper problems within British society? Is violence is an outcome of the Internet and whether the Internet contributes to violence as a form of entertainment.

Our objective is to present our audience with an issue and tackle it through discussion. We felt that by staging a live debate that concentrated on the issue of the internet contributing to violence being seen as form of entertainment, we would not only be able to express our own individual views on the matter, but also gain the understanding of the public. We wanted to question the public’s understanding of violence as entertainment and whether or not they feel it has a place.

As a group of four strong minded people, we felt it necessary that we all had our own say. Our intent is not to force our opinions on others, but provide them with a choice and let them reach their own decision. There is no right or wrong answer to the question proposed, it all comes down to personal opinion. The aim of the debate is to demonstrate this, by getting our audience involved they too can voice their opinion, after hearing the research and opinions that we put forward and taking part in an in depth discussion. In order to do this we understand that it is vitally important that we have provided them with enough information for them to make a decision for themselves.

Violence affects everyone in one way or another; it is present in all types of media, television, newspapers and the internet! But would violence as entertainment still be present without the internet? Has it contributed to crime rate and sadistic behaviour? What do we view as acceptable entertainment and should we interfere with the contents of the internet by using censorship? Through our discussion and debate we aim to try and bring some light to these subjects, and even if we do not come to solid conclusions- we hope to get our audience members thinking about them.

Our main aim was to produce a live structured debate open to the audience to contribute and speak their opinions. We wanted to use an issue that is growing rapidly but is often disregarded therefore we wanted to raise awareness. By having a debate we hope to produce a valid argument that covers points both for and against violence in the media contributing to real acts of violence in today’s society. We hope to achieve a heated argument between the four of us, but we also hope to provoke to audience, raising elements that they may be able to identify with or feel strongly towards. By having a group debate, we are able to have a general idea of what contribution the media has to violence today. By aiming our debate around young students who are highly opinionated and less influenced by the media than young children for example, we hope to form a successful argument by stepping out of the box and looking at these issues as outsiders. As students and young adults we are very prone to violence, and we often regard it as part of the binge culture we live In today, therefore it is interesting to look closer at something we are affected by everyday, the media, and question whether it is causing or influencing these problems.

By taking part in virtuality in performance, we have learnt the huge affect of the media and technology on our lives without realizing the extremes of these effects. By forming our debate we hope to discover what these effects are.

Our Aims

Firstly, to tie in with the huge internet emphasis on this module, we have decided to try and bring our subject matter to the masses through using the ever-popular facebook. We have set up a group on facebook entitled "Does the internet contribute to violence being used as entertainment?"
You can visit this at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6925185291
We are simply putting questions forward in the hope to gain answers from other people. We all have different opinions on whether the internet contributes towards violence as entertainment. I personally think that it does make everything more accessible but this isnt necessarily a bad thing. It doesnt make people violent, I think this in inherent in some people's human nature. Violence as entertainment has always been prevalent throughout history so I dont think the internet is to blame for it.
These are the questions that we are asking in our facebook discussion board:
"Is this wrong? Is the internet feeding people's sadistic pleasures, or are some humans inevitably transfixed by violence anyway? Does it matter? And should we be censoring what people can upload and watch more strictly or would we end up living in a 1984 society?"