television made it possible to ingest brief images of news without having to spend time doing so.
The impact of the shortened attention span is that we are unreceptive to contextualised accounts ... [creating] a discourse of abbreviated images and messages from which we cannot escape.
(Postman, 1985;cited in Schissel, 1997)
This results in people in the public domain finding satisfaction
in drawing their own conclusions from brief snippets of decontextualised
information reported by the media. In the context of youth as a threat
to law and order and the safety of the community, this equates to images
being displayed on television, or next to articles in print, depicting,
though not necessarily, youths in scenarios relevant to the story being
reported. Due to the short attention span of the cursory viewer, or reader,
people tend to “focus” on the simplistic and decontextualised image (Schissel,
1997), hence drawing their own usually incorrect conclusion, resulting
in another moral panic, regarding youth crime, manifesting itself in the
public domain. Schissel (1997) sums this up nicely, explaining all this
stems from “constructed images of goodness and badness... we see in media
portraits of young offenders becoming the basis of the moral framework
for the entire society”.
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