 Steve Vrooman Columnist |
Many times when people talk about the extent of the affect media has on our lives they have no clue how to wrap their brains around the confounding subject. Just like our health-consciousness that prefers a butter substitute to lower our cholesterol than to actually eating less butter, we prefer the simple answer.
Let me address the multiple ways that people get it wrong with a deceptively simple statement: media always affect us, but in complex ways. Here are some examples.
During the Sept. 20 episode of Dateline on NBC we learned about one of the most exciting new legal excuses since the Twinkie Defense: Pro Wrestling Made Me Do It. A young boy in Florida practiced some wrestling moves that he'd seen on TV on his playmate and she died. The lawyer wants to tell us that the kid couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality because faked wrestling moves give us the illusion that we can just get up after a body slam.
Maybe. What the defense attorney on Dateline neglects to explain is how a kid can give his friend more than 30 contusions, two brain injuries and a lacerated liver, as well as scratches all over her face without noticing that she is either (a) screaming or (b) unconscious. Kids know when it hurts.
Sure, wrestling probably inspired the kid to try the stuff. And assuming the unlikely, that he'd never seen an actual fight before, perhaps he didn't know that violence hurts. But I'll bet that all that confusion was cleared up when his friend screamed. He must have figured it out. He just chose to keep on hurting her.
Sept. 21 WB played the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer episode that had been postponed last spring due to the violence in Littleton. Not surprising in the wake of media critics who told us that video games program kids into killing machines. In this episode, Buffy becomes telepathic. She hears the voices of the tormented souls that are the high school students of America. She hears one who plans to kill everyone in the school. This episode, which gave some actually tasteful perspective to teen violence and teen suicide, would probably have been a good thing for us to see at the time.
But people don't get it. We assume that even an anti-violence program might incite teens to further slaughter. Decades of media research have proven only one thing conclusively: violence in the media causes arousal. That is, if a kid watches The Power Rangers, she'll be more likely to kick someone at recess. But that is a far cry from drawing a direct connection between a video game and the meticulous, year-long planning it took to orchestrate the Columbine tragedy.
I am not arguing that violence in the media doesn't affect us. It does. It just doesn't happen the way those eager to hop on the censorship bandwagon conveniently think it does. There is too much emphasis put on the individual programs that portray violence, and not enough put on the overall message of "might is right" that our culture propagates.
What do John Wayne and Ah-nold movies teach us? They teach us that violence is a solution to our problems. The person who can marshal the most violence the most effectively can solve even the most impossible of problems. And that guy can still be the good guy. We are taught this message all our lives. It doesn't matter how much Tom and Jerry pound each other or how many body parts fly in Doom. What matters is that Harrison Ford can shoot someone as a joke and still be good ol' Dr. Jones. Just like Arnold can take out a whole island of soldiers in Commando, we are taught that the most impossible of tasks can be solved with guns.
It's easy to say that we should ban games like Quake, or hold Oliver Stone responsible for copycat Natural Born Killers. That lets the rest of us, and Monday Night Football, off the hook. Only in a country where we've already accepted violence as a legitimate solution to things could people watch the nihilistic critique of a violent culture that is in Stone's Natural Born Killers and want to go out and do it themselves.
Steve Vrooman is a graduate student in communication. Email him at svrooman@asu.edu.
