Violence In the Media III: How I Became Desensitized To Essays On Media Violence

Right now, even as you read this, communications professors are being exposed to an average of 5.7 essays per hour on the effects of media violence. Think about this. By the time you’ve finished this article another professor will be one essay closer to poking his marking pencil through the next student that walks into his office. Imagine the barrage of the same statistics over and over every day. After a while, this kind of inane parroting of numbers from very old texts and journals (quoted and recopied more times than the Bible was by medieval scholars) has to numb even the sharpest mind. It’s only a matter of time before these professors become desensitized to the senseless and utterly predictable arguments that people fall into because they lack the imagination to solve society’s problems in any other way. Always resorting to essays against media violence – that can’t be the answer, can it?

Inevitably in these essays, the concept of desensitization comes up. You’ve heard the idea before – usually through the very media that supposedly endanger our moral sensibilities in the first place. Desensitization to violence happens when you are exposed to so much violence on TV and in films and video games that you hardly react at all to real violence in your surroundings. Granted, I do get an uneasy feeling in my stomach after four or more hours straight of Halo, but I think that’s more due to the pizza I swallowed without chewing and then washed down with some gummie bears and a ginger ale.

At the same time, though, we do learn to copy the actions of our heroes or those actions we learn in video games. When I used to play street hockey as a kid, the kids whose heroes were the enforcers tended to check me into snowbanks. And I can remember many a time coming out of an arcade after playing Galaga and having the urge to shoot all the cars that cut across my path. There was also the Tetris effect of having the urge to fit shapes into variously shaped empty spaces. And I never ever went into a crowded department store parking lot after playing Pac-Man. I would wander around the aisles for hours, gobbling up garbage and running from the blue parking enforcement guys.

But these were eidetic responses to the visual imagery and would soon pass. What media critics more often focus on are the tendencies for children to behave more aggressively after watching aggressive shows. But as Gerald Jones points out in his book Killing Monsters, one study (Coates-Pusser-Goodman) “found that preschoolers were three times more aggressive after watching a video than before – even though the video was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He goes on to say that this led some to conclude that watching TV itself led to violence, but Jones sees it differently: “I love Fred Rogers, but I suspect if I were forced to sit in a hard plastic chair in a strange room and stare at him when I’d rather be out playing, I’d act aggressively too.” Still, there are enough studies out there that show an immediate although short-lived imitative response to violent shows for us to conclude that –

Ah ha! Gotcha! That’s what I want to write in the margins of these students’ essays. How can the same violent stimulus (say, Mister Rogers) desensitize us – in other words, lull us into passivity – and at the same time prod us to commit violent acts? The fiendish television must be pulling us in two directions and we are much like James T. Kirk in the episode where he becomes the calm Kirk and the angry Kirk. Who will ever put us back together again? Oh, who? Who?

Of course, the writers of these essays are not concerned for themselves, but for the children. (Won’t somebody please think of the children!) Children, they contend, are much more impressionable than adults. They see the Road Runner knifing and gutting the coyote, thrusting his beak repeatedly into the coyote’s eyes – ooops, that’s the underground version I’m thinking of. Anyway, children are more apt than adults to be traumatized by violence and deadened to it (again, you can see the contradiction). Children are more apt to imitate something they have seen on TV or read about in the wrong books. Children are more apt to mindlessly imitate words they hear and read and then repeat them without doing the proper research or trying to come at an essay topic from a new and exiting angle.

Hmmm… maybe there’s something to this desensitization after all.