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[pclark]

Great article!  The simple test is indeed revealing.  When I taught critical thinking, I ran a similar test in class.  I would ask my students, quarter after quarter, "How many of you have played a video game in which you killed someone?"  Since most of my students ranged in age from 18 to 25, a sea of hands would go up.  Then I would ask the follow- up question, "Now, how many of you have actually killed someone?"   

Of course, I would get from some students (almost exclusively from male students) the obligatory pause, then the obligatory look-around to see if anyone were watching, then the obligatory "Well, actually...." then the laughs, etc., but then the hands would slowly, reluctantly, but inexorably all go down, after making sure others in the class (presumably female) were suitably impressed or at least temporarily amused. 

I would point out, "Even if one of you has--and I doubt that you have, but of course I hope that you haven't--I teach several sections of this course every quarter, and by the end of the week, I've taught well over a hundred students, and so the 'killer elite' turns out to be...less than 1% of the people going through this classroom every week. Ergo, the video game alone can't explain it."

Of course, Hilary et al can only hope we were so impressionable and susceptible to influence, because if we were, then the key to success in politics would be painfully obvious:  make a video game!  A video game in which we are urged not to kill, but to vote for this proposal or that proposal.  Rlease a new version every year to keep up with the changing demands of our masters.  Social planning triumphs!   

[pclark]

To extend that thinking, we've all played Monopoly and Life, right?  Why then aren't more of us real-estate tycoons?  Why don't more of us get married, have kids, and start saving for their education immediately?  Must be because they're not video games--oh wait, Monopoly is a video game now. 

As soon as something becomes a video game, apparently it's effect on society is irrevocable.  This is the secret reason why we haven't stopped environmental damage--not enough of us bought and played Ecco the Dolphin.

[litcrittr82]

I loved Ecco the Dolphin.  It was like a flight simulator, but  with a sea mammal.  What a great reference! 

That aside, I was also grateful for the article, and applaud Blake's efforts to debunk the medie-effects nonsense.  A few talking points:

1) Blame aside, should we treat sexually explicit material the same as we treat violent material?  I'm often angered by how much tolerance we have for representations of violence, and how little we have for representations of sex and bodies.  I remember when the actress from Desperate Housewives appeared with Terrell Owens on a Monday Night Football promo.  The promo showed the actress (Nicolette Sheridan, or something like that?), in a towel; the innuendo (not shown, of course) was that she'd drop the towell for T.O.  People went nuts about this.  And then, I'm sure, Fox showed a shoot 'em up movie and ESPN 2 showed a full contact MMA cage match.  Snoooze!  IMO violence hurts people in more ways than sex (which often is more celebratory and pleasurable than getting shot in the face).

2) The sympathetic reaction to media-effects charges is typically motion to censor.  Blake's invocation of ethical criticism is germane here, because ethical criticism seems to require more discussion (productive in and of itself re. these kinds of issues, I think), less censorship.  Nobody's stopping anyone from saying 'Grand Theft Auto is a stupid, barbaric game; don't buy it!'  I'd rather that kind of talk than 'Grand Theft Auto is insideous; we must ban it.' 

3) It's too easy and too popular by this point to blame everything on Theory.  Why does Blake go there?  Is it necessary to go there?  Does he have a point?  It seems to me that both ethical criticism and contemporary postmodern criticism could feasibly arrive at the same conclusions re. the media-effect argument: it's a load of sh**.

Thoughts?

[pclark]

Yup, echo on Ecco--great game, miss it, and miss Sega in general.  Loved your talking points!

1) I agree that portrayals of violence--if there are any harms from it, which I doubt--are less objectionable than portrayals of sex.  I also think an actress who implies she'd drop the towel for TO is nothing new, and certainly isn't caused by any particular media influence, though it was certainly discussed in the media ad nauseum, I agree.  If anything, since she implies she'd drop the towel willingly, it shows that in modern times, women have more free will in sexual matters, which I'm told is supposed to be one of the good things about the show Desperate Housewives (I confess I've never watched it). If we were living in old times, then substitute the Duke of Rottingwood or whatever for TO, and it would be different--perhaps the Duke would simply ride up with armed soldiers and take the prettiest local daughters for his harem or whatever, whether they were willing or not.  So I'm inclined to think that we should treat violence and sex the same, or we should treat them differently, but reprioritize--we should be more concerned about violence than sex.  Again, I'm not convinced there are any demonstrable harms from portrayals of either, but an additional point is that it'd be much harder to track sexual harms, easier to track violence harms.  After all, not everybody kills someone, but everyone has sex.  At least I hope so.
2)  I agree again, we have a rating standard for games which makes it clear that certain games are for kids and others aren't, just like movies, so all the censorship blather seems unnecessary, and I also agree that ethical criticism provokes discussion which is a desirable end in itself.  Ethical criticism provokes thought and discussion, while censorship ends it.  Those who propose censorship essentially want to terminate thought and discussion and replace it with knee-jerk, heiling, goose-step submission to authority.
3) totally agree with your comment about theory and barely stopped laughing long enough to write this.  I wonder if he's trying to dress up the seriousness of his comments, i.e., "by the way, I'm not just ranting, I've got serious theory to back up what I'm saying."  Ok, great, but I thought your whole point was that theory wasn't necessary, that "media-effects" is demonstrably false?  Both types of criticism should be able to spot a load of sh**, which is another way of saying, "This shouldn't receive all the attention that it does, what's there to talk about," which is the main thrust of his article. 

Cheers!

[moderator]

Here's the free link for the Bill Blake article

[eumaios]

Here's a link: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i42/42b00601.htm

Hope I did that right.

Blake suggests an experiment: play Grand Theft Auto for a week or two and then see if you go out and steal cars, blow things up, kill people, and have sex with strippers. Blake seems to argue that since hardly anyone who undertakes the experiment will actually do those things, we can conclude that claims of media influence are vastly overblown.

Well, okay. Here's another experiment. Businesses spend billions and billions of dollars on TV advertising in the belief that advertising can change some people's behavior. The research question: Does that aspect of media--advertising--indeed change behavior? Or have all those companies been duped and bilked?

Have successful ad campaigns occurred, campaigns that changed people's (including children's) behavior? If we say yes, then we must admit that media can have effects.

Maybe you can claim that advertising and programming, or advertising and video games, differ in some fundamental way, and that we somehow treat the former as "real" while remembering that the latter is merely make-believe. But consider how little advertising is rational, how little of it provides genuine information for us to ponder, and how much advertising relies on emotional appeals, irrational associations between a product and a pleasurable feeling (power, sex, confidence), and sheer repetition of a message.

Another facet of the experiment: Can we find children who have been trained to be avid consumers of certain products? Did those children's training as consumers come entirely from their families and schools, or did some (perhaps most) of it come from media?

A smaller facet of the experiment: Does the Hannah Montana industry make money?

I have to conclude that electronic media do influence the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of children and young people.

Now, I don't think that playing Grand Theft Auto is likely to turn the average kid into someone who relishes brainless violence, and I understand that politicians who make speeches about the wicked media are pandering to the fear and confusion of voters, and I'm unwilling to give government power to censor any medium. I don't know how much video games, violent programming, sexually explicit programming, and just plain stupid programming affect kids.

But it seems to me that a kid doesn't have to go whole hog to suffer some harm from media. For instance, a boy doesn't have to become a killer or thief to exhibit the influence of video games or television. If a boy resorts to violence just a little more quickly, or if he becomes just a little more likely to commit petty theft or cheat in school, or he views and treats women with just a little less respect, then he and we have been harmed. Although I loathe governmental censorship, I believe very much in parental censorship.

[pclark]

Eumaios, loved your post.  I could ask of my class, "How many of you have seen an ad for Tide detergent?"  Probably all hands would go up.  "How many of you have bought Tide detergent?"  Most hands or many would stay up. So of course we can't have it both ways: ads influence people, and video games influence people.  Granted, but people are more disposed to buy than they are to kill.   

I also agree with you when you say, "But it seems to me that a kid doesn't have to go whole hog to suffer some harm from media. For instance, a boy doesn't have to become a killer or thief to exhibit the influence of video games or television."  Granted, some harm is still harm, but one could make the same claim about almost anything. 

Almost anything has some harm attached to it.  Eating too many raw vegetables gives you gas.  Forcing kids to read Romeo and Juliet in high school exposes them to the idea that young people fall in love against the wishes of their parents--of course, the strong moral attached that they end up dead if they don't watch it makes it less risky, right?  Scare the heck out of them--or at least try to, anyway--and it's ok, you see. 

But the harms are just beginning to be tallied:  kids have to read for school, they resent it, and many of the kids, even the ones that go to college, eventually become essentially aliterate--they can read, but they don't, unless it's required.  Reading seems to turn kids off from reading.  Should we ban Romeo and Juliet, or better yet, ban reading? 

[litcrittr82]

Picking up on shared points btw. pclark and eumaios in no particular order:

I want to distinguish between the effects of individual media items and the effects of mass media and media industry writ large. 

Individual media items (e.g. Grand Theft Auto), particularly those that sell so widely, will undoubtedly have *some* effects on consumers.  Eumaios raises a good point about these kinds of effects: just because it isn't murder doesn't mean it's not a viable effect.  I would agree that media items can affect the way we respond to authority, the way we understand gender and gender norms, the way we receive representations of violence, etc.  These things can desensitize, to an extent.  But, as pclark points out, so can just about anything, including literature.  At some point we have to ask ourselves whether the problem is the media item, or the culture that so avidly produces and consumes it.  I think we'll find that the answer to this questions is both, and it's pretty clearly a circuitous process.  IMO, the critique of this problem must be a more thorough cultural critique, e.g. how does the video game industry and the gamer subculture come to be, and come to produce externalities x,y,z.  This strikes me as more useful and more responsible than a critique of the 'vulgarity' of individual media items (losing the forest in the trees).

I'm far more concerned with the ability of mass media to produce and reproduce consumerism at every level of society, facilitating the co-optation of each and every anti-consumerist measure that we think up.  For example, not long after it was cool to shed your designer label for a 'vintage' Duran Duran t-shirt (hipster chic), the big labels found ways to market and sell crappy t-shirts for the price of DKNY or Burberry.  It wouldn't surprise me if DKNY actually makes Duran Duran tees.

[pclark]

litcrittr:

agree totally about your distinction between mass and individual media, that it is a circuitous process, and that more thorough cultural critique can help.  Perhaps "ethical criticism" can help somewhat--thoughts on if and how?

Also, not sure what you mean when you say, "facilitating the co-optation of each and every anti-consumerist measure," as people who are willing to buy a crappy t-shirt aren't thinking about the actual quality of the t-shirt, apparently. Or another way to put that is that DKNY or Burberry missed the boat on the catchiness of the message on the t-shirt itself--what was wanted was a cool message, not a designer label.  Am I making sense?

[eumaios]

Eumaios, loved your post.  I could ask of my class, "How many of you have seen an ad for Tide detergent?"  Probably all hands would go up.  "How many of you have bought Tide detergent?"  Most hands or many would stay up. So of course we can't have it both ways: ads influence people, and video games influence people.  Granted, but people are more disposed to buy than they are to kill.   

I also agree with you when you say, "But it seems to me that a kid doesn't have to go whole hog to suffer some harm from media. For instance, a boy doesn't have to become a killer or thief to exhibit the influence of video games or television."  Granted, some harm is still harm, but one could make the same claim about almost anything. 

Almost anything has some harm attached to it.  Eating too many raw vegetables gives you gas.  Forcing kids to read Romeo and Juliet in high school exposes them to the idea that young people fall in love against the wishes of their parents--of course, the strong moral attached that they end up dead if they don't watch it makes it less risky, right?  Scare the heck out of them--or at least try to, anyway--and it's ok, you see. 

But the harms are just beginning to be tallied:  kids have to read for school, they resent it, and many of the kids, even the ones that go to college, eventually become essentially aliterate--they can read, but they don't, unless it's required.  Reading seems to turn kids off from reading.  Should we ban Romeo and Juliet, or better yet, ban reading? 

pclark,

Did I suggest banning anything? Or did I explicitly say that I don't want government to have power to censor?

Besides, your analogy doesn't make sense. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that forcing teenagers to read Romeo and Juliet might plant some dangerous notions in their heads. If my experiences as a student, father, and teacher mean anything, the vast majority of young folk might read the play once, struggle with the language, understand little of it, hope to learn just enough to pass the test, and then do a brain-dump and get rid of everything they knew about Romeo and Juliet. Even the rare person who loves literature doesn't read the same play for two or three hours every day. The messages of Romeo and Juliet, whatever they are, are not repeated again and again, day after day, week after week, and so on and so forth.

But the messages of electronic media are repeated again and again. That's what makes TV and other electronic media effective: repetition. Advertising salespeople pitch two things: reach and frequency. A kid sees the fate of Shakespeare's young lovers once; he might see the strippers in Grand Theft Auto hundreds of times.

I'm not sure what raw vegetables and flatulence have to do with media.

Advertising influences people. Television programs create trends. Cockeyed optimists that we are, we even expect our teaching to have some effect on some students. That electronic media can influence behavior in undesirable ways seems only logical and commonsensical to me. That grownups therefore have a duty to monitor their own children's use of media, and even to censor what their children see, seems equally commonsensical.

[litcrittr82]

I think ethical criticism (and when I say this, I'm speaking more or less of Martha Nussbaum's response to Richard Posner) is useful to temper the manifest excess of some of our accepted values (freedom of enterprise, freedom of speech).  To oversimplify: I'll grant the skinheads their hate rally because I value freedom of expression, but I've learned enough to take them to task for it in my critical response.  Likewise, I'd rather live in the 21st century U.S. than early 20th century Russia, but I have plenty of critical ammo (cite Dickens) to point out the ill effects of hypercapitalism.  Like Marxist criticism and even/other postmodern critical modes, I find ethical criticism very useful for these kinds of problems.  I wouldn't set up ethical criticism and Theory at opposite poles, as Blake seems to do.

Re. co-optation, yes, you're making sense.  I think the rub is precisely that mass media have conditioned us to not think rationally (about quality, as you say, for example).  The marketing machines are too many steps ahead of the consumer in a number of ways (media outlets, capital, marketing and aesthetic strategies, etc.).  What we consumers think is subversive is always already just another way of buying into the system in the system's terms.  That's when you know the system is kicking our a$$e$: when it convinces us that we're flouting it by buying a 'countercultural' item designed by a cultural hegemon like a major corporation.  

Anyway, I may be leading us off-track with this mass media and consumerism talk. 

[pclark]

Eumaios:

Points well taken, you did NOT suggest banning everything, you did say you DON'T want the government to censor anything. 

But I still think my main point that everything has an influence is still relevant, so that when you say, "I have to conclude that electronic media do influence the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of children and young people," I reply, "so what--everything has an influence."

That was the main point of the vegetables/gas example--that even beneficial activites can have a down side if taken to excess, so to your point about repetition, if people are saturated by the media, and if that is excess, then we can saturate them with other messages to counteract that, but another way to look at it is that not all those messages become equally actionable by the recipient--people are still more inclined to buy than to kill.

[pclark]

litcritter:
Not off track at all.  But do you think that media have conditioned us to not think rationally--to Eumaios' point--in part because of the saturation/repetition, or is it more than that?  Ads are an explicit or implicit call to action, whereas the media effects of some of the things we've been discussing (video games, etc.) aren't quite so spelled out. 

As for Blake, I would not put ethical criticism and Theory at opposite poles, either.  Also, did you see Jarmusch's film Dead Man?

[august]

Interesting posts so far.   

What do you think of the recent situation in Gloucester, the "pregnancy pact" among 18 or more teenagers from a High School there.  Although the grownups in the town are baffled, many have speculated that it was the influence of the recent movie "Juno" and then the pregnancy of teenager Jamie Lynn Spears who influenced these girls and made teen pregnancy somehow an acceptable and even cool thing to do.

[pclark]

August:

MSNBC article on this dated June 20th, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25272678, says,
Nationwide, teen pregnancies are showing signs of rising after steadily declining from 1991 to 2005. This trend was highlighted Thursday when Britney Spears' 17-year-old sister Jamie Lynn, star of Nickelodeon's popular TV show "Zoey 101," gave birth to a baby girl, according to People magazine. 'The data seem to be indicating that the declines that we had seen through the 1990s are coming to a close," said David Landry, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit group focusing on reproductive issues. Landry cautioned against attributing the trend to Hollywood following the recent hit movie "Juno," in which a teenager gets pregnant and decides to have the baby, and "Knocked Up," a comedy about a one-night stand. "The trend emerged before those movies," he said.

Not that MSNBC is an objective source, but three things occur to me:

1) was it Juno/Spears, the alleged pact itself, the lack of contraception also noted in the article, the alleged lack of self-esteem shared by several of the girls also noted in the article, or the sex act itself which contributed most directly to the teens' pregnancies?

2) all sources in the above article agree investigation into the actual Gloucester event is nowhere near concluded.  The Columbine shooting comes to mind, in which the official report was quietly released long after the event and showed that many of the so-called "facts" reported in most media accounts were way, way off from reality (examples:  the two shooters weren't really part of the so-called trench-coat mafia as reported, and if they were, they were outcasts even in that marginalized group; no one on the so-called hit list was killed, and anyway the list itself was ridiculous, in that it included Tiger Woods, etc.)


3) The Gloucester situation (local) may or may not reflect any larger demographic trend (national)

Having said all this, Eumaios has already pointed out that my posts sound somewhat snotty, so please don't take my sarcasm in #1 above too seriously.

:=)