Display of Violence through Cultural Codes in Turkish TV Serials: A Study on Three Turkish Serials

Safiye Kırlar Barokas; Murat Mengu; Seda Mengu

Safiye Kırlar Barokas Giresun University
Murat Mengu İstanbul Arel University
Seda Mengu İstanbul Arel University

Abstract

The concept of violence mainly comprises the use of brutal force and fierceness. The acts of violence; on the other hand, can be defined as the practices pertaining to intimidating, terrorizing and even tyrannizing human beings. Violence as one of research areas in sociology has recently attracted a great interest among sociologists and also some other researches in social sciences. In general, all these researchers submitted various classification of violence to the area and the common point in these was the fact that violence had been changing according to the society and the historical period that researchers dealt with. It is also clear from these researches that an individual learns violent behavior through his or her education; more clearly during their socialization process. There is a widespread agreement on the idea that a healthy and balanced society necessitates the conscious contribution of each member to the solution of social, economic and cultural problems. Undoubtedly, the mass media, particularly TV, plays a significant role in this process. In the same way, the media content considerably accelerates the respective learning process through news, advertisements and particularly TV serials. In other words, mass communication plays a vital role in accelerating the behavioral changes in a society. This study focuses on the question whether or not the violence displayed in popular Turkish TV serials might develop a potential for desensitization to violence. With this idea in mind, the primary purpose of this study is to find out the rate of violence demonstrated in the respective serials. Thus, three popular TV serials with the highest rating have been determined as the corpus of this study. Then, every sixth episode of each serial in a 36 –week- season has been chosen as the sampling. Totally, 18 episodes have been examined with content analysis method regarding the display of violence in various forms.

References

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