Sociology of the Arts. Victoria D. Alexander
the weakest effects” (p. 137). Felson concludes that “exposure to television violence probably does have a small effect on violent behavior for some viewers, possibly because the media directs viewer’s attention to novel forms of violent behavior that they would not otherwise consider” (p. 103).
So, careful reviews and meta‐analyses of a wide range of studies show that either there is little to no measurable effect of violent media on aggression or crime, or else that it is devilishly hard to establish the connection empirically. Nevertheless, this has not quelled concerns about media violence. Centerwall (1993) argues that small effects should not be discounted because they aggregate to many more violent attacks at a national level. He claims that if television had never been invented, “there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults” (p. 64). He argues that children are powerfully affected by pictorial violence, unlike adults, and that small children cannot distinguish between real and cartoon violence in the same way that adults do and that they are less sensitive to the motives of people who are violent. In this way, he believes that television violence is a public health issue, like smoking and road traffic accidents. He suggests that parents limit television for their children. But, he says, parental vigilance is not enough.
Television violence is everybody’s problem. You may feel assured that your child will never become violent despite a steady diet of television mayhem, but you cannot be assured that your child won’t be murdered or maimed by someone else’s child raised on a similar diet. (p. 69)
He advocates what we now call parental control devices to allow adults to lock out violent shows based on a rating system, similar to one used for movies. There have been similar calls for rating systems of popular music as an aid to keep songs with violent or sexually explicit lyrics away from kids.
In a very interesting study, Harkness (2013) studies Chicago gang members who rap in the gangsta style. Harkness describes how gang members use raps posted to YouTube “to insult and goad one another” (p. 152), and his article starts with the true story of one young rapper murdered in the course of one of these online contests, apparently by a rival gang. Harkness does not make a shaping (or reflection) argument about street gangs and gangsta rap—he is interested in the cultural practices of the rappers and the “microscene” this creates—however, the two worlds were deeply enmeshed. Here is a place where violence in life and in music converge. Does this give us reason for concern? (That is, beyond that micro scene and the potential perpetrators and victims therein, who surely deserve compassion.) Savage (2008), a criminologist, argues that those who work in the field with offenders do not talk about media violence as a cause of violent crime. Instead, they focus on situational factors such as poverty and concentrated disadvantage, adverse experiences such as child abuse, and individual traits such as addictions and significant psychiatric issues. “Serious offenders” she writes, are not simply “individuals who watched too much TV as young children” (p. 1125).
Other professionals may come to a different consensus. For instance, Philo (1999) argues that teachers regularly cite violent media as a problem in their schools. He studied reactions of 12‐year‐olds to Pulp Fiction (1994), a film that is rated “18” in the United Kingdom. One‐third of pupils in the studied class had seen the movie, despite being seven years too young with respect to the movie’s classification. The children were able to recall many of the movie’s scenes in great detail, including gruesome ones, and they thought that several of the characters in the film were “cool.” Philo wonders if the casual acceptance of the Pulp Fiction story by children shows how a worldview “with no empathy for victims” becomes “part of ‘everyday’ values” that can promote pernicious behaviors such as “bullying at school or intimidation at work” (p. 51).
Finally, what of the people who consume popular music, movies, and television? Ourselves. We are, for the most part, non‐violent members of society. As Ferguson and Savage write, “Our moral values deter us from behavior that might really harm another person. Even under highly provocative circumstances, people can almost always refrain from committing violence” (p. 133). The media effects literature suggests, in essence, that other people succumb to television violence (but not us). Most of us are not violent, but are some of us just a little bit of a bully? Or might it be that we are more tolerant of violence in society?
Notes
1 In the film Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore calls into question the influence of Manson’s music. As the title of the film suggests, the shooters also liked to go bowling. This activity may have had as much an effect as listening to metal music, but no one thinks to blame bowling, as that sounds preposterous. See also Cohen (1972) on moral panics and Gunter (2008) on explaining “copy‐cat” events.
2 See Valkenburg, Peter, and Walther (2016) and Piotrowski and Valkenburg (2015) on indirect and selective media effects. Ferguson and Savage (2012) argue that wave‐to‐wave longitudinal designs do not solve the causality problem, because personality traits associated with preference for violence are stable over time, so are already confounded before the first wave of the study.
NOTES
1 1 For a recent review of Media Effects literature, see Valkenburg, Peter, and Walther (2016).
2 2 In a very interesting and empirically impressive article, Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei (2019) argue that individuals who heavily watched entertainment television as children “were less cognitively sophisticated and civic‐minded as adults” (p. 2497). They argue that opportunity costs create this effect. That is, for every hour of television an individual watches, they necessarily forgo an hour that could have been spent on cognition‐enhancing activities (e.g. reading books, exercising or playing sports, and socializing).
3 3 For a critique of the ability of the advertising industry to influence people, see Schudson (1986).
4 4 See, e.g., Barthel (1988), Cronin (2000), Ewen and Ewen (1992), and Klein (2000).
5 5 Binder’s (1993) excellent article shows how frames and counter‐frames work. Moreover, she finds differences in frames used when discussing heavy metal and rap which reveal racialised discourses.
6 6 This assumes that sales actually fell, but there is no clear evidence on this. It may be that the story is simply a compelling urban legend.
7 7 Curran (1990) scathingly attacks the equation of the media effects tradition with a hypodermic model of influence. This, he says, “is a breath‐taking, though often repeated, caricature of the history of communications research that writes out a whole generation of researchers. It presents as innovation what is in reality a process of rediscovery… Effects research cannot be said in any meaningful sense to have been ‘dominated’ by the hypodermic model. On the contrary, its main thrust ever since the 1940s was to assert the independence and autonomy of media audiences and dispel the widespread notion that people are easily influenced by the media. It did this by developing many of the same insights that have been proclaimed afresh in the recent spate of ‘reception’ studies, albeit in a different technical language and sometimes with less subtlety” (pp. 146–147).
4 A Mediated View: The Cultural Diamond
As we have seen in previous chapters, it is tempting to view the relationship between