Audience Responses to Real Media Violence

Audience Responses to Real Media Violence: The Knockout Game considers an emerging and relatively overlooked area of media effects research: user-generated cellphone videos that feature real violence and its victims. Focusing specifically on a recent sinister media trend known as the Knockout Game, Mary Grace Antony explores how audiences respond to the victims in these videos. How do we assess the realism of this violence? And how do these evaluations of realism in turn influence our feelings of empathy and concern for the victims of violence? The burgeoning abundance and availability to real media violence online makes these questions more relevant today than ever before, and illustrates our complex responses to new and emerging media subgenres.

“Mary Grace Antony offers a much-needed comprehensive explication of the processes in which audiences respond to media violence. She challenges fundamental questions of media violence—how do audiences define reality, existence, and moral values in mediated violence? Refreshing and comprehensive, this book provides a timely review of research on real violence in the media.”, "Antony points our attention to a controversy that has been known to researchers for a long time: real portrayals of violence are likely to have greater effects than fictional ones. Her book is casual and accessible, and shares some uncomfortable truths about what we’re watching on the internet.", 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, professionals.

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