Part I: Profile of Moral Panic

In Risk and Blame, Anthropologist Mary Douglas describes the cultural basis for witch hunts in traditional societies. 

• "Whether the witch is able to do harm or not, the attribution of a hidden power to hurt is a weapon of attack against them .... A successful accusation is one that has enough credibility for a public outcry to remove the opportunity of repeating the damage." 

A moral panic starts with an unspeakable tragedy which sparks an attempt to ascribe blame and responsibility. Initially, accusations flow freely but focus on those targets who are already the subject of anxiety. Douglas notes, 

• "Though anyone can accuse, not all accusations will be accepted. To be successful an accusation must be directed against victims hated by the populace. The cause of harm must be vague, unspecific, difficult to prove or disprove." 

Once one accusation sticks, it becomes easier to pile on charges. Our rush to judgement overwhelms our ability to rationally assess the evidence. Our need to take action supersedes our ability to anticipate consequences. Moral panic shuts down self-examination at the very moment when real problems demand careful consideration.

Several weeks after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, 

• [* For more information (and opinion] about those school shootings, see the former article on this list: Counter Balance: North American Rumble - and How to Avoid it: 
  < https://www.ipce.info/library/web-article/north-american-rumble-and-how-avoid-it > - Ipce

... the United States Senate Commerce Committee launched a series of hearings, chaired by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Ark.), on the "marketing of violent entertainment to children." 

Introducing the investigation, Brownback explained, "We are not here to point fingers but to identify the causes of cultural pollution and seek solutions." The phrase, "cultural pollution," of course, already presumed a consensus that popular culture was a worthless iritant which was to blame for various social harms. Brownback was prepared to sweep aside constitutional protections: 

• "We are having endless debates about First and Second Amendment rights while our children are being killed and traumatized." 

Brownback focused his ire on forms of popular culture that met youth rather than adult tastes: 

• "I am willing to bet that there aren't many adults who are huge fans of teen slasher movies or the music of Cannibal Corpse and Marilyn Manson." 

Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah) declared Manson's music tremendously offensive to everyone in America who thinks, a category that seemingly does not include a significant number of high school and college students. 

William Bennett, former Secretary of Education and self-proclaimed guardian of American virtue, called on Congress to make "meaningful distinctions" between 

• works that used violence to tell " a larger story" such as Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, or Clear and Present Danger, 
• and works that "gratuitously" exploited violence, such as The Basketball Diaries, Cruel Intentions, or Scream. 

His "commonsense" distinction was at heart an ideological one, separating works that offered adult perspectives from those which expressed youth concerns.

Though they understood the hearings as a "ritual humiliation" of the entertainment industries, the senators were feeding a "cultural war" which was more and more focused on teenagers. As a GOP operative Mike Murphy explained in that week's Time, "we need Goth control, not gun control." 

Hatch engaged in homophobic banter about whether Manson was "a he or a she" while Brownback accused members of the Goth subculture of giving themselves over to "the dark side." Such comments reinforced bigotry and fear. 

Adult fears about popular culture were being transfered towards those people who consumed it. The Goths were a relatively small subculture whose members drew inspiration from Romantic literature and constructed their personal identity by borrowing from the iconography of the horror film and S/M pornography. The group could claim a twenty year history without much public attention because they had previously not been associated with violent crime. However, the Columbine shooters had been mistakingly identified in some early news reports as Goths and as a result, this group had been singled out in the post-Littleton backlash.

From the outset, Congress was unlikely to set federal policies to regulate media content, which would not have sustained constitutional scrutiny. They counted on public pressure to intimidate the entertainment industry into voluntarily withdrawing controversial works from circulation. 

• Manson canceled some concerts. 
• MGM stopped selling The Basketball Diaries. 
• The Warner Brothers Network withheld the airing of the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer until midsummer.

The biggest impact of the moral panic, however, would be felt in the schools - both public and private - as teachers and administrators increasingly saw their students as "threats" to public safety and suspected popular culture of turning good kids into brutal "monsters." 

Online journalist Jon Katz's remarkable series, "Voices from the Hellmouth," circulated hundreds of first-person accounts of how American schools were reacting to the shootings. As Katz reported, 

• "Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was to be dangerous."
• [* See also: Let's stop isolating geek, Netculture, by Jon Ktz, 30 April 1999:
  < https://www.tegenwicht.org/03_littleton/article_jon_katz.htm > - Ipce

Many schools took away web and net access. Many kids were placed into therapy based on their subcultural identifications or interests in computer games or certain kinds of music. Students were punished for taking controversial positions in class discussions or on essay assignments. 

In one case, a student was suspended for wearing a Star of David to school because his teacher thought it was a gang insignia. Another was sent home for wearing a black coat that was officially part of his ROTC uniform. One school district banned heavy coats. Knowing little or nothing about the popular culture consumed by teens, teachers, principals, and parents were striking out blindly.

Other educators took risks, challenging the crackdowns on "Goths" in their schools and bringing the materials that Katz had gathered back into their classrooms for dialogue with their students. Local journalists investigated Katz's reports and found them accurate. Civil rights organizations were confronting a record number of complaints from students who felt their constitutional rights were being infringed. 

Then-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle added fuel to the fires with a speech attacking the concept of "students rights" as an unjustified interference with classroom discipline, insisting that "Our children cannot learn in an environment of chaos ... If we're going to make an error, err on the side of school safety."

Part II: What's Missing from This Picture?

Speaking before the Senate Commerce Committee, Lt. Col. David Grossman, the author of On Killing, asserted, 

• "the real media critic isn't Siskel and Ebert. It's the American Medical Association and it's time to place them in charge of the FCC and other such organizations." 

Grossman argued that current scientific and medical understandings of "media effects" supported his demands that government actively regulate media content. Grossman proposes expanding the current category of pornography to include violent entertainment. His language consistently pathologizes culture, depicting media products as "toxic substances" analogous to cigarettes in their damaging impact on children's mental and physical health.

With these hearings, the decades-old "culture war" rhetoric entered a third phase. 

In the first phase (during the Reagan years), the religious right refashioned itself as the "moral majority" in a belated backlash against the 1960s counterculture. This phase was largely ineffective, since Democrats directly challenged its overt effort to legally mandate religious doctrines and values. The phrase, "culture war," was associated with political extremism. 

The second phase (the Bush years) was characterized by attacks on "political correctness" within higher education and had much more impact on public opinion, helping to decredentialize those in the Humanities and Social Sciences who sought to better understand the complex nature of American culture. 

In the third phase, the rhetoric of morality is displaced by the language of medicine and science; doctors are assumed to speak an objective truth about media effects. The shift towards a language of scientific objectivity has made it possible for a significant number of liberal democrats, such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) or Sen. Max Cleland (D-Georgia), to align themselves with conservative Republicans in calling for the regulation of media content.

The Pseudo-science of Media Effects

However, there are many problems with this "scientific" approach to culture. For starters, the American Medical Association has no specific cultural expertise. We can trace a long history of misdirected attacks by medical authorities against popular culture, dating at least as far back as the efforts in Shakespeare's England to close the theaters in the name of public hygiene. In most cases, the medical establishment promotes a fairly conservative agenda, suspicious of those cultural forms associated with the working class or ethnic and racial minorities, making recommendations that ratify their own tastes and quarantine works they dislike.

Despite Grossman's claims, cultural works are not carcinogens: cultural works are complex and contradictory, open to many different interpretations, subject to various unanticipated uses. Popular culture's complex relationship with its consumers cannot be reduced to simple variables or tested through lab experiments. Even if such rigor were possible, media activists exaggerate the body of scientific evidence supporting their claims. To date, relatively few studies have examined the impact of video and computer games upon teens and nobody knows how relevent research on television is to our consumption of interactive media.

The best media effects researchers qualify their findings and few argue for a direct link between consuming media images and performing real world violence. If video game violence was an immediate catalyst, we would have difficulty explaining why none of the shootings involving teens have occurred in movie theaters or video arcades where the direct stimulus of game playing would be most acute. Instead, these murders have tended to occur in schools and we need to look at real world factors to discover what triggers such violence. 

A more careful analysis would read video games as one cultural influence among many, as having different degrees of impact on different children, and as not sufficient in and of themselves to provoke an otherwise healthy and well-adjusted child to engage in acts of violence. 

Some children, especially those who are antisocial and emotional unbalanced, should be protected from exposure to the most extreme forms of media violence, but most children are not at risk from the media they consume. Parents, not governments, are in the best position to know what kinds of culture their children should consume. Media activists strip aside those careful qualifications, claiming that the computer games are "murder simulators" teaching our children to kill. 

Our current legal definitions of obscenity insist that the work must be "taken as a whole," read according to prevailing community standards, and judged to be "utterly without redeeming ... value." 

Media effects research, on the other hand, places little or no interest on the work as a whole or to the work's meanings or values. It adopts a crude stimulus-response model of media consumption and focuses on localized "media images" not on their function within larger stories. In many cases, research subjects are forced to watch a rapid succession of violent images removed from any narrative context. Much of this research makes little or no distinction between different kinds of stories our culture might tell about violence.

Much media effects research removes media consumption from real world contexts and situates it in a laboratory. But media never functions in a vacuum. Playing a game in an arcade is a very different experience than playing it in one's own home or as part of a military training exercise. Media consumption gains its meaning through association with a range of other activities that constitute our everyday life.

Media effects research shows limited interest in what those stories mean to the people who consume them. The focus has been on measurable biological responses - neural stimulation, pulse, heart beat, pupil dilation. Such research essentially measures the adrenaline rush that occurs when we play an exciting video game. 

Yet, neural stimulation is only part of the story. As current cognitive research into emotion suggests, the human body experiences remarkably similar degrees of neural stimulation riding a car off a bridge and riding a roller coaster, but one is experienced as terrifying and the other pleasurable. The difference has to do with our interpretations of those initial neural stimulations.

Much media effects research assumes a casual connection between the physiological reactions or attitudinal shifts measured in the laboratory and subsequent real world behavior. In a 1994 study, on the other hand, Ann Hagell and Tim Newburn noted that prisoners serving time for violent crimes had, on average, consumed far less media than the general population.

Media effects research systematically deskills children, often assuming that they cannot separate fantasy from reality. Activists compound this problem by ignoring considerable developmental differences between small children and teens. Children at a relatively early age, around four or five, began to make basic distinctions between realistic and fantastic representations of violence, with documentary images (news reports of local crime, historical footage of war, nature footage of predators and prey) far more emotionally disturbing than cartoons or video games. 

Primatologists note that many mammals make basic distinctions between play violence and actual violence. The same two animals might jostle playfully in one context or fight to the death in another, depending on the presence or absence of "play faces" or reassuring noises. Surely, our children can make the same distinctions.

Part III: A More Humanistic Perspective

Media effects research enjoys its current government support not because it is the best methodology for understanding the relationship between media consumption and real world behavior but because its stimulus-response model offers simple solutions to complex problems. 

To really understand the place of violent entertainment in contemporary youth culture, we must broaden the conversation to include researchers of many different methodologies - 

• anthropologists, 
• criminologists, 
• social and cultural historians, 
• media scholars, 
• experts on children's play and literature, 
• and so forth. 

Rather than starting from the assumption that we are investigating what media content is doing to our children, we should ask what our children are doing with the media they consume. 

We are living through a period of profound media transition: the availability of new entertainment and information technologies impact all aspects of our social, cultural, political, economic, and educational experience. Children are often the first to embrace these new technologies and have discovered complex new ways to employ them 

• in their social interactions with their friends, 
• their recreational activities, 
• their creative expression, 
• their homework, and 
• their political lives. 

We trivialize these changes when we reduce the important conversations we should be having about future directions for technological development into a moralistic debate about violent video games. My field, Comparative Media Studies, adopts humanistic and qualitative social science methodologies to better understand those changes and explain them to the general public. Humanistic research paints a very different picture of media consumption than found in the media effects literature.

First, media consumption is assumed to be active (something we do) not passive (something that happens to us). Media technologies are tools and we can use them in a variety of different ways - some constructive, some destructive.

Second, media consumption is assumed to be a process; we work on media content over a long period of time; our immediate emotional reactions are only part of what one needs to understand if you want to predict real world consequences of media consumption.

Third, different consumers react to the same media content in fundamentally different ways as it is fit into their larger understanding of the world and so universalizing claims are fundamentally inadequate for accounting for media's social and cultural impact.

Fourth, consumer response to media is more often creative than imitative. All of us construct our own personal mythologies from the contents made available to us through the mass media and we are drawn towards images and stories that are personally meaningful to us because they match the way we see the world. We use them as vehicles to explore 

• who we are, 
• what we want, 
• what we value, and
•  how we relate to other people. 

Harris and Kleibold were drawn towards darker and more violent images and invested those images with their most anti-social impulses. Another child might use those same images to emphasize the need for community and friendship in a world marked by violence and competition.

Finally, real life trumps media images every time. Media images are read against our perception of the world which is built up through countless direct experiences. Real life has the power to exert material consequences. 

Harris and Kleibold were legally required to go to school; they were subjected to real ridicule and abuse from their classmates and this real world brutality helped to motivate their actions. 

Popular entertainment does not exert this same kind of coercive control over us. Media content is more likely to reinforce -- rather than fundamentally alter -- our existing prejudices and predispositions.

The Meaningfulness of Violent Entertainment

Media effects research has had little to say about why children are drawn towards violent entertainment, except to ascribe a universalized blood lust. Humanistic research, on the other hand, offers useful tools for understanding why children find media violence attractive and meaningful. 

The materials of popular culture are read as modern myths that reflect the values and desires of the people who produce and consume them. Although we need to spend much more time talking with teens about their relationship to popular culture before we can offer a full account, one can point to a number of possible explanations for the appeal of violent entertainment.

First, violent entertainment offers teens a fantasy of empowerment. The "Quake grrls," for example, are a subculture of young women who understand playing violent video games in explicitly feminist terms -- as an opportunity to compete aggressively with boys without regard to biological differences and by doing so, to rehearse for later professional competitions. 
But, many boys come home from being bullied at school and also experience an enormous release in playing violent games. Blood and thunder imagery runs through the history of boyhood play and fantasy. Game images echo the pictures another generation of boys drew with crayons on their notebooks or had in their heads as they hurled pinecones on the playground. The new technologies make these images more vivid and more open to adult scrutiny, but they do not fundamentally alter the contents of boys' imaginations.

Second, violent entertainment offers teens a fantasy of transgression, a chance to test the limits of their parent's culture. Slasher films, for example, often depict a world where parent's attempts to protect teens from harsh realities place kids at risk and where adults dismiss youth efforts to explain monstrous events they have observed. Such films are often the only works take seriously the experience of nonconformist teens who do not get the positive reinforcement received by football heroes and homecoming queens. After a decade of attacks on political correctness, is it any surprise that many students prefer to be politically incorrect, to embrace forms of culture that seek to shock adults or that express fundamentally antisocial fantasies (whether in the form of South Park or Red Neck Rampage)?

Third, violent entertainment offers teens an acknowledgment that the world is not all sweetness and light. The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the violence and darkness of fairy tales is important for children to confront as a means of acknowledging the darker sides of their own nature. Without such a depiction, children might take their own transgressive impulses as evidence that they are a "monster," rather than learning how to recognize and control those aspects of themselves. 

One Goth teen told me that he had been treated like a monster all of his life, by parents, teachers, and classmates, and so he had adopted a Goth persona because for the first time, it allowed him to decide what kind of monster he wanted to be and helped him to identify other teens who also felt stigmatized. 

Many teens come from broken homes, encounter domestic violence, confront poverty, and worry about crime in their own neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, they are drawn towards representations of the world which are dark and pessimistic and which acknowledge these troubling experiences.

Fourth, violent entertainment offers teens an intensification of emotional experience. Adolescence is a time of powerful, often overwhelming feelings. If teens are going to escape the intense feelings of rejection or damaged self-esteem they often experience, they require forms of popular culture that are loud and raucous, have pumped up style, promise speed and spectacle, offer abrupt shifts between the comic and the violent. Their fascination with violent video games is as much a response to their aesthetic qualities as to their explicit content.

In short, teens aren't drawn to Quake or Scream because they are blood thirsty or because they think violence is the best real world response to their problems. These works 

• offer them the best available vehicle for their fantasies of empowerment, 
• take seriously what young people feel and think about the adult world, 
• acknowledge the darker sides of the teenagers' everyday experiences, and 
• offer an intense release from real world tensions. 

If, for moral, political, or aesthetic, reasons we find such violent entertainment reprehensible, then we are going to have to offer new genres that satisfy those basic urges at least as well.

Part IV: Proposals for the Future

All of the above suggests a fairly simple conclusion: we should not let moral panic push us to abandon our commitment to free expression and to embrace increased government regulation of cultural content. We should take seriously our children's relationship to popular culture and create contexts where we can better understand what roles media plays in their lives. 

The knee-jerk reactions to the Littleton shooting caused tremendous damage as adult authorities struck out blindly against nonconformist students, insuring that we further alienated those already feeling alien and closed the door to meaningful adult-youth communication. As the one-year anniversary of the Littleton shootings approaches, we need to reassess how we engage with controversies over popular culture. Educators should adopt a basic ethical principle -- above all, do no harm. 

The following are some aspects of a more constructive response to these issues:

1. Supportive digital communities for youth

Harris and Kleibold weren't alienated because they went online. The online world offers many teens a new opportunity for social connections, for finding friends outside the often closed community of their own high schools. 

For example, online interventions are a powerful weapon for slowing the rate of gay and lesbian teen suicide at a time when many other institutions have failed to respond to the homophobia in their daily lives or offer basic information about their emerging sexuality. For kids who are social pariahs, the online world offers a chance to find someone out there, anywhere on the planet, who doesn't think you are a hopeless geek. 

Some concerned adults responded to Littleton by constructing welcoming communities for teens who feel alienated from their classmates and school authorities. Projects, such as hsunderground.com, channel antisocial impulses into more constructive directions, offering a degree of free speech not found in even the most progressive private school, connecting angry kids to a larger social community.

2. The demand for K-12 media education

Media education has historically been an occasional treat but not a central aspect of the educational process. As media change influences all of our core institutions and practices, we need to acknowledge that media literacy is a basic skill, part of what it means to be a good researcher and writer, an intelligent citizen or a shrewd consumer. 

Children already have a greater degree of media literacy than we imagine but our refusal to mobilize those skills in the classroom, to value what teens have taught themselves about media, helps to build a wall between school teaching and real world experience. Media education can take many forms, ranging from whole courses dealing with media and modern culture to more localized lessons on the ways communication technologies influenced the development of American democracy or on how to assess the reliability of different information sources.

3. Adult knowledge and respect for popular culture

The "moral panic" embodied adult anxieties and ignorance about youth culture. Media education too often functions as an excuse for adults to impose their judgements, rather than as a means for mutual learning. 

Adults need to take the time to listen to what their children have to say about popular culture, just as we make time to listen to what children tell us about their little league games or band practices. We need to listen and learn because these forms of cultural consumption are an important part of children's lives. 

Schools can create opportunities for open dialogue about popular culture, but only if they lower the emotional temperature. Youths can't speak openly or honestly about their culture if the immediate adult response is to ban whatever comes to light. Adults need to enter into those conversations with an open mind, ready to rethink their prejudices, but they also must be prepared to justify their own aesthetic choices and moral values.

4. A more tolerant school environment

Talk to most high school students and they offer a similar explanation for the shootings: Harris and Kleibold were cut off from their classmates because they were different; their isolation turned rancid inside them until they struck out blindly against their classmates. Many teens recognize those feelings within themselves, even if most of them have the self control not to act on them. 

Kids, whose cultural tastes are outside their school's mainstream, feel at risk, ridiculed by their classmates and held suspect by their teachers. Our schools need to invest at least as much efforts into understanding and responding to the cultural differences introduced by contemporary youth cultures as we spend examining the historical differences between various races and ethnic groups. Every kid has the right to feel safe and welcome in their own school.

5. Parental discussion groups about media content

If we are going to place the responsibility of policing culture onto parents, then we have to provide the resources they need to respond intelligently to a complex and changing cultural environment. A one-size-fits-all solution doesn't work because our children aren't the same size and don't mature at the same rate and our families come from many different backgrounds and don't have the same values. 

The web enables parents to compare notes with other parents before purchasing a birthday or holiday gift. Such exchanges between parents about specific media content are much more valuable than ratings systems, because these ongoing interactions allows us to determine the values behind these assessments.

6. Creative responses from media producers

Much popular culture isn't so much dangerous as it is banal and mind-numbing. Game designers and developers depend too heavily upon formulas as a safe way of anticipating market demand. In doing so, they fall back on violent content as much out of laziness as from any desire to exploit bloodlust. 

For those reasons, we need to encourage the games industry to enter a phase of self-examination, to try to better understand what draws children to the existing games. The challenge is to broaden the range of available options, so that every consumer finds forms of culture that reflect their values and give expression to their fantasies. We probably can't tell stories without some element of conflict, but those conflicts can take various forms. We must explore other ways of representing and resolving conflict that supplement, even if they do not altogether replace, those currently on the market.

* Henry Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His account of testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee on the marketing of violent entertainment to teenagers can be found in the July 1999 issue of Harpers.