After reading "Aggression: The Impact of Media Violence" by Sissela Bok, I was immediately overcome with violent rage and felt a disturbing urge to come to fisticuffs with the first person I saw. This is not true of course. In reality I just felt a little thirsty. What "Aggression" did make me do, however, was think. Does seeing violence on television desensitize my reaction to violence in real life? Bok seems to think so. In fact she argues that the glamorization of violence by the media is in direct correlation to the rise in violent crimes.
At first this idea seems a little silly. I mean we all grew up laughing when Wile E. Coyote perpetually blew himself up trying to catch that pesky roadrunner. We cheered when Hulk Hogan repeatedly smashed Macho Mans face off of the uncovered turnbuckle. We even saw Luke Skywalker get his hand chopped off with a lightsaber (by his own father none the less). We witnessed all this violence but it never made us want to harm anyone ourselves. But then I remembered breaking my arm jumping off of my uncle Bill's bar pretending to be the Ultimate Warrior and giving my cousin a flying elbow drop. Yeah, that sucked. But hey, I was just a kid and you got to learn somehow right.
Well it turns out going through puberty doesn't help. Bok tells of a teenage couple who after watching the cult classic film "Natural Born Killers" by Oliver Stone, went on a murderous rampage as they acted out the story of the fictional psychotic killers Mickey and Mallory Knox. Another and perhaps the most famous case of media enacted violence is of course the assassination of John Lennon by the now ironically famous Mark David Chapman. Chapman of course professing he had been pushed to kill after reading J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye". These are some extreme cases and for the most part are carried out by people who are crazy. right? Well sort of.
Bok refers to psychological studies that show that the more accustomed viewers become to seeing violence, the more they will see violence as being acceptable. The viewer will find ways to identify with the aggressor and develop a lack of pity for the victim. Another study showed that within 10 - 15 years after the introduction of television, the rate of violent social crime nearly doubled.
Another cause for concern is what Bok refers to as an "epidemic of children killing children". She uses statistics to prove this pointing to the fact that homicide is now the second leading cause of death for young Americans between the ages of 15 and 35. For African Americans between 15 - 24, it is the leading cause of death. This of course begs the question. Is all this violence in the media creating actually making us aggressive?
Their are of course other factors that come into play when talking about violence. Gun control, drug abuse and broken homes are a few that come to mind. But Bok's goal is to put onus on the media for their part and she makes her point heard.
The whole time I was reading this, I kept thinking about the grotesquely violent video games kids are playing these day. Grand Theft Auto comes to mind. It is also no secret that the U.S. Military has teamed up with some game makers hoping to convince kids that real combat is as cool as button mashing their controllers. This apparently has worked as they have even put out their own games depicting the ongoing conflicts in the middle east.
Do you think we are dishonoring our Veterans when we create and play video games depicting the atrocities that they had to experience in order to preserve our freedom?
2 comments:
I do believe that we are making them relive what they had to experience when people play games. I honestly don't think its a good idea to create these games in the first place.
Hi Richard,
Thank you for this thoughtful analysis. One thing we can't deny is that Bok started an interesting conversation. It's important that we look at the effect of violent programming, as you say, even if there are other factors at play. We can't just throw our hands up in the air and say, "Well, there's other shit out there too, so don't blame it all on violent movies!"
I liked the humour with which you treated this subject. You seemed to invite the reader to keep talking about this serious subject, even laugh a little at our own attempts to play Batman or Haystack Calhoun.
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