Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Violent Culture: An excerpt from Henry Jenkins’ blog
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The news of last week’s tragic shooting at Virginia Tech has brought the usual range of media reformers and never-camera-shy culture warriors scurrying back into the public eye to make their case that “media violence” must be contained, if not censored, to prevent such bloodshed from occurring again.
None of this should surprise us, given the cycle of media coverage that has surrounded previous instances of school shootings. An initial period of shock is quickly followed by an effort to round up the usual suspects and hold them accountable - this is part of the classic psychology of a moral panic. In an era of 24 hour news, the networks already have experts on media violence on speed dial, ready for them to arrive on the scene and make the same old arguments. As a media scholar, I find these comments predictable but disappointing; disappointing because they block us from having a deeper conversation about the place of violence in American culture.
So, let me offer an intentionally provocative statement: Media violence is not something that exists outside of a specific cultural and social context. It is not one thing which we can simply eliminate from art and popular culture; it’s not a problem we can make go away. Our culture tells lots of different stories about violence for lots of different reasons for lots of different audiences in lots of different contexts. We need to stop talking about media violence in the abstract and start talking about it in much more particularized terms.
Almost no one operates on a definition of violence that broad. Most of us make value judgments about the kind of violence that worries us; judgments based on the meanings attached to violence in specific representations. Why is violence so persistent in our popular culture? Because violence has been a persistent theme across storytelling media of all kinds. If we were to start going after media violence, then we would need to throw out much of the world’s literary canon and close down our art museums.
Within the broad sweep of human history, it is hard to make the case that our culture is becoming more violent. Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre,” for example, describes how workers in early modern Europe got their kicks by setting cats on fire and running them through the streets. Consider the role of public hangings in 19th century America, or the popularity of cock fights and bear baiting in Shakespeare’s London. We have, for the most part, moved from an era where humans sought entertainment through actual violence into a period when we are amused through symbolic violence.
Media violence is not a uniquely American trend, though school
shootings, by and large, are. Media violence is a global phenomenon. The physicality of violent representations is easily conveyed
visually, allowing it to be understood and appreciated by people who
might miss the nuances of spoken dialogue, who might not understand the language in which the film was produced or be able to read the subtitles. For that reason, action stars are often the most popular performers in the global market. As the United States, Japan, China, India, Korea, and a host of other film-producing countries compete for dominance in the global market place, we are seeing an escalation in the intensity of representations of violence. American media
often seems mild when compared with that of Asia or Latin America.
If we take most of the existing research on media effects at face
value, almost nothing would suggest that consuming media violence would turn an otherwise normal kid into a psycho killer. In practice, the research implies that consuming media violence can be one risk factor among many, that most incidents of real world violence can not be traced back to a single cause, and that real world experiences (mental illness, drug abuse, histories of domestic violence exposure to gangs, etc.) represents a much more immediate cause of most violent
crime.
Understanding media violence as a risk factor—rather than as the cause of real world violence—is consistent with some of the other things we know or think we know about media’s influence. At the risk of reducing this to a simple formula, media is most powerful when it reaffirms our existing beliefs and behaviors, least powerful when it seeks to change them. We tend to read media representations against our perceptions of the real world and discard them if
they deviate too dramatically from what we believe to be true.
None of this is to suggest that the media we consume has no effect. Clearly, those kids who already live in a culture of violence are often drawn most insistently to violent entertainment. They may seek to use it to release their pent up anger and frustration; they may use its images to try to make sense of what they see as aggression and injustice around them; they may draw on its iconography to give some shape to their own inchoate feelings, and that’s part of the way I would understand those disturbing photographs of Cho Seung-Hui
striking poses from Asian action movies.
We can’t argue that these films had nothing to do with the horrors he committed on teachers and students at Virginia Tech. I think it does matter that he had access to some images of violence and not others and that he read those representations of violence through a set of emotional and psychological filters which distorted and amplified their messages.
We need to get beyond rhetoric that treats media violence as a carcinogen, a poison or a pollutant. Rather, we should be asking
ourselves what kinds of stories our culture tells about violence and how we are making sense of those representations in the context of our everyday lives. What we need is more meaningful violence -representations of violence which incite and provoke us to think more deeply about the nature of aggression, trauma, and loss, representations which get under our skin and make it hard for us to simply sit back and relax in front of the screen. And we need to talk intelligently about these media constructions of violence, rather than trying to push such works away.
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