Overview of my study

Here is an excerpt from the initial overview for my research study

As Berger (2003) suggests, consuming television texts is a far more complex process than it would first appear, involving an interconnected network of individuals, institutions, technologies and ideologies that are all concerned with the widespread transmission of messages to a social group or groups. However, when we turn our attention to the purpose of this form of communication, we can surmise, as Vine (1997) does, that the whole point of the television mass communication system is to influence, whether that influence takes the form of; advertising for commercial gain, education for social enrichment, the perpetuation of an ideological position, or diversion from everyday life - television texts can be seen to have encoded purposes. How we decode and use this information is where the contention in the Media ‘Effects’ debate seems to lie. Arguments abound over how potent these influences are on ‘affecting’ the consumers agency, if at all, and whether or not these ‘affects’ are damaging to the individual and society as a whole.

What the proposed study intends therefore, to explore and develop, is the notion put forward by such theorists as Barker (1997), that suggests that mediated texts (such as television) most probably do exert some influence on the consumer, and that this can have an ‘affect’ on their, as Buckingham (1997) proposes, behavioural, emotional and ideological responses. As such the proposed study will look to locate manifestations of media related anti-social behaviour occurring in individuals or groups, within a wide nexus of causal factors, suggesting that the text alone is insufficient in exiting deviant responses, and that one must look to, as Honderich (1993) does, the conflation of antecedent conditions that have to be met to cause ‘effect’.

In this way, the proposed study intends to explore Honderich’s notion of sufficient causal circumstance (SCC) in relation to instances of anti-social behaviour that appear derived from the consumption of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) television broadcasts. The study will look to contrast the nexus of SCC in WWE television consumers who enact WWE based anti-social behaviour, with those WWE consumers who do not, in order to confirm/refute the hypothesis that the simulated violence and antisocial content of WWE texts are in themselves not the isolated causes of WWE related deviance.