VIOLENCE- can be defined as the use of physical force to injure or abuse another person, or verbal acts that seek to cause physical or emotional harm to a person or object.
- If you were to ask a consumer of popular entertainment, be it comics, Stephen King, professional wrestling, or top 40 popular music, to explain the worth of what he is consuming, he or she will probably tell you "I know it's junk, but who cares? I like it."" Such popular entertainment makes no plea to be educational, nor moral in any self-conscious way. As Jules Feiffer has written of comic books, "Junk, like the drunk at the wedding, can get away with doing or saying anything because, by its very appearance, it is already in disgrace. It has no one's respect to lose; no image to endanger."" The very senselessness and vulgarity of such entertainment has made it not just unattractive for many to view, but unimportant for critics to study. A demand to censor violence in popular culture is long gone. .
- Because of the rise in electronic media, the increase in violence seen in Western culture in the past few decades has been exponential. The adjective often used to describe the violence seen in broadcast media of all sorts is "gratuitous-. This implies that these scenes do not have a proper place in our culture. They are unnecessary. And the fear is that if you watch too many of them for too long, aggression will increase and antisocial behavior may result. .
- Violence is everywhere we turn. Stephen King often sits atop the bestseller lists of the New York Times. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel on the commercial networks are robbing PBS of an audience, and forcing it to hold telethons in order to remain on the air. There aren't any good foreign films down at the Century 16 because the Hollywood moguls insist on cloning movies like Halloween, Scream, and Blade into a never-ending family of sequels and prequels, each more graphic in its display of violence.
