Interpersonal Communication and The Mass Media
Hearing about events; knowing others who have been victimised – these are thought to raise perceptions of the risk of victimisation. This has been described as a 'crime multiplier', or processes operating in the residential environment that would 'spread' the impacts of criminal events. Such evidence exists that hearing of friends' or neighbours' victimisation increases anxiety that indirect experiences of crime may play a stronger role in anxieties about victimisation than direct experience. However there is a cautionary note: '… many residents of a neighbourhood only know of indirectly via channels that may inflate, deflate, or garble the picture.' A subject's criminal risk perception is exaggerated by peer-communication on crime and only moderated by the own experience.
Public perceptions of the risk of crime are no doubt also strongly shaped by mass media coverage. Individuals pick up from media and interpersonal communication circulating images of the criminal event - the perpetrators, victims, motive, and representations of consequential, uncontrollable, and sensational crimes. The notion of 'stimulus similarity' may be key: if the reader of a newspaper identifies with the described victim, or feels that their own neighbourhood bears resemblance to the one described, then the image of risk may be taken up, personalised and translated into personal safety concerns.
Yet the relationship between fear of crime and mass media is unclear, at least in its causal ordering. To put the dilemma in simple terms: do people fear crime because a lot of crime is being shown on television, or does television just provide footage about crimes because people fear crime and want to see what's going on? The complex nature of crime could allow the media to exploit social naivety, covering crime not only selective, but also distorting the everyday world of crime. Some say the media contribute to the climate of fear that is created, because the actual frequency of victimisation is a tiny fraction of potential crime.
With crime accounting for up to 25 per cent of news coverage, the quality and angle of the coverage becomes an issue. The media displays violent crime disproportionately, whilst neglecting minor crimes. The reality is violent crime has been declining in the past 10 years The profile of offenders in the media is distorted, causing misunderstanding of criminal offending.
Unfortunately, however, despite an abundant literature on media effects – particularly the 'mean world' hypothesis – little work has been done into how representations, imagery and symbols of crime circulate in society, transmitted and transformed by multiple actors with a wide array of effects, only to translate into personal fears about crime. Perhaps future work will take account of the transmission mechanisms through which representations, beliefs and attitudes about societal risks are propagated in different social and cultural contexts.
Read more about this topic: Fear Of Crime
Famous quotes containing the words mass and/or media:
“The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)