critical thinking

ANNE MARIE SEWARD BARRY

Anne Marie Seward Barry received her Ph.D. in Perceptual Psychology, Literature, and Film from Boston University. She is Associate Professor in the Communication Department at Boston College where she teaches courses in Visual Communication Theory, Visual Design, and Film as Communication. She has written several articles on visual communication, as well as The Advenising Portfolio (1990) and Visual Intelligence (1997), where "Media Images and Violence" first appeared. In this essay, Professor Barry discusses the effects oftelevision and video games on crime rates.

Getting Started

Does watching violence on television have a direct effect on people's behavior? Do you think that playing video games that involve violent actions actually influences behavior? Why or why not? Do you play video or computer games yourself and if so, do they include violent elements? If they do, what is appealing about this aspect of them to you? Do you think people easily separate entertainment violence from real violence? Barry presents evidence that participating in such violence whether by watching or actually by playing does increase violent behavior. What do you think?

n 1973, Joy, Kimball, and Zabrack studied the effect on a rural community in Canada when the television was first introduced there that year. Using two other similar communities as control groups in the double-blind study, they found that over a two-year period, aggression evidenced by biting, hitting and shoving had increased by 160 percent in the community where television had just been introduced. The increase, which affected boys and girls equally, was generally distributed rather than attributable to specific groups with an explainable predisposition to violence. The rate of violence in the two control communities remained the same.

Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann, who have done several of the most comprehensive long-term studies in this area, followed 875 children from 1960 to 1981, from the point when they were 8 years old. After controlling for baseline intelligence, aggressiveness and socioeconomic status, they found that at age 8, the children who watched programming with violence in it, including Saturday morning cartoons, were more likely to be cited as meaner and more aggressive in their play by teachers. At 19, they were more likely to be in trouble with the law. At 30, they were more likely to be convicted of violent crimes and to be abusive toward their spouses and children. The amount of television children watched at age 8 predicted the amount of violence they perpetrated later in life. Second- and third-generation effects also appeared, as children who watched more television were more likely to punish their own children more severely than those who had watched less television.2 Summarizing his research findings as chairman of the Commission on Violence and Youth of the American Psychological Association, Eron testified before Congress in 1992: "There is no longer any doubt that viewing a lot of televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, which may lead to crime and violence in the society." If media

I L. A. Joy, M. M. Kimball, M. L. Zabrack, "Television and Childrenß Aggressive Behavior," in The Impact of Television: A Natural Experiment in Three Communities, ed., T. M. Williams (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986), 303—360.

21.. Rowell Huesmann, "Psychological Processes Promoting the Relation Between Exposure to Media Violence and Aggressive Behavior by the Viewer," Journal of Social Issues 42, no. 3 (1986): 125—139.

See also: L. Rowell Huesmann and Leonard D. Eron, Television and the Aggressive Child (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), 45—80; Leonard D. Eron and L. Rowell Huesmann, "The Control of Aggressive Behavior by Changes in Attitudes, Values, and the Conditions of Learning," Advances in the Study of

Aggression (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 139—171; Leonard D. Eron, "Parent-Child Interaction, Television Violence, and Aggression of Children, American Psvchologist 37, no. 2 (1982): 197—211; Eron, Leonard D. and L. R. Huesmann. "Adolescent Agression and Television." Annals of the New York Academy ofSciences 347 (1980): 319—331.

violence is reduced, he testified, "fully 10 percent of interpersonal aggression would be eliminated within the society."3

Brandon Center-wall, in studying the relationship between the introduction of television and homicide rates among whites in the United States, Canada, and South Africa, used the advent of television and the rise in crime rates in the U.S. and Canada after the introduction of television to accurately predict homicide rates in South Africa. After the introduction of television in the 1950s, the homicide rate doubled in the United States and Canada within ten to fifteen years. During the same period in South Africa, where television was banned until 1975, the homicide rate dropped by 7 percent. After the introduction of television into South Africa, however, homicide rates increased 130 percent between 1975 and 1987 4

In explaining his findings, Centerwall notes that he found none of the alternative explanations of economic growth, civil unrest, age distribution, urbanization, alcohol consumption, capital punishment, or availability of firearms satisfactory. Recognizing that blacks in South Africa lived under very different circumstances from those in the United States, for example, Center-wall used statistics only for white crimes. Knowing statistics can be a murky business at best, he used only homicide figures, which are highly reliable. Antiwar unrest and civil-rights activity in the United States were not paralleled in Canada, yet the U.S. and Canada showed the same rise in violent crimes. South Africa was comparable in economic development, book, newspaper, radio and cinema industries, so that television could be isolated as a factor from other media influences. In all three countries homicides rose within five to seven years and doubled within fifteen to twenty years—the amount of time, Center-wall believes, required for television influence to come of age.

The pattern he uncovered has held up consistently in every 5 regional, racial, and international comparison Centerwall has made. Although he does not count out other factors that contribute to violence, his conclusion is that if "television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer

3Quoted in "Does TV Violence Cause Real Violence?" in Violence on Televi- sion: Special Report by the Editors of TV Guide (New York: TV Guide, 1992), 6; and in "The New Face of Television Violence," in Violence on Television: Special Report by the Editors of TV Guide (New York: TV Guide, 1992), 6. 4Brandon Center-wall. "Television and Violence: the Scale of the Problem and Where We Go from Here," Journal ofthe American Medical Association 267, no. 22 (1992): 3,060-3,061.

homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults "5

VIDEO GAMES

As socially destructive as television and film violence can be, many believe that they pale in comparison to video games, which reward a "penchant for control, competition and destruction, and which actively involve players—overwhelmingly males between 13 and 30 years old—within the violence. While research has found that girls do not enjoy video games, boys find them to be the most psychologically arousing medium. It is also the one on which they concentrate most intensely.6 Unlike TV or film, video games are intentionally interactive, and players must participate in causing the violence, usually winning the most points for the most outrageously cruel acts.

Since 1990, video games have surpassed all toys as the most popular present for children, representing a $7 billion industry in the United States. Traditionally, the most violent ones are the most popular. In 1993, for example, it was estimated that 75 percent of video games relied on violent content: "Mortal Kombat,' then America's top-grossing arcade game, featured heroes decapitating people, ripping out their hearts, or tearing off their heads. During that Christmas season under public pressure, Toys "R" Us, Bradlees, and FAO Schwartz pulled off the shelves Sega's "Night Trap"—which featured vampires who stalk women, drill holes in their necks, and hang them from meat hooks. Soon thereafter Nintendo put out a slightly sanitized version of "Mortal Kombat," but when it started to lose money, and when the company received thousands of telephone calls and letters from young people demanding the more graphic version where the winner can gain extra points by ripping out a victim's spinal column, they rereleased the more violent version. Even though video game makers have followed network and cable's lead in agreeing to label their games for violence and sex content, and have formed panels to monitor violence in their respective media, labeling signals only a forewarning of content, not a change in content itself.

51bid. See also Brandon Center-wall, "Exposure to Television as a Risk Factor for Violence," American Joumal ofEpidemiology 129 (1989): 643—652. 6Robert W. Kubey and Reed Larson, "The Use and Experience of the New Video Media Among Children and Adolescents," Communication Research 17 1990): 107-130.

An important part of mental maps evolving from media, video games reinforce the concept of violent action as an appropriate response when threatened, and they condition the player to respond quickly and without hesitation by rewarding the most viOlent play alternatives. Research comparing more and less aggressive versions of video game play, television program content, and dart game play, has shown that any activity performed in a more aggressive mode increased reported hostility[footnoteRef:1] —an observation that reconfirms what we learned in the Gulf War—that playing video games is very effective rehearsal for real-life responses. Childhood play is the best training ground for adult action. [1: P. J. Favaro, The Effects of Video Game Play on Mood, Physiological Arousal and Psychomotor Performance. Hofstra University, New York, 1983.]

Like violence or cigarettes, video games can also be addictive. "Doom," a multiplayer video game in which players can destroy monsters or each other with chain saws or shotguns, for example, was introduced to the market place in 1993 by giving away the first episode on the computer Internet, and then selling the subsequent ones once the customer got hooked. Acknowledging that their marketing strategy was similar to the way drugs are dealt, the Id software company increased profits from $1.5 million to $10 million within their first year, introducing "Doom Il" in 1994. [footnoteRef:2] [2: Peter H. Lewis, "Virtual Mayhem and Real Profits," New York Times 3 September 1994, 35, 37.]

In 1993, it was estimated that on average, students with com- 10 puters spent 1.5 hours a day interacting with computer games. By 1995, Nintendo had developed a 32-bit (the higher the bit the higher the resolution and the realism) game system called "Virtual Boy" with vinual reality technology which immerses players in a three-dimensional stereo-surround world with high-resolution images; concurrently, film elements also moved into interactive CD-ROM formats with titles like "Corpse Killer," directed by John Lafia who also did Child's Play 2, and Under the Killing Moon, which allowed viewers to use computers to direct the plot. By the end of 1995, "Mortal Kombat 3" was available on shelves in a 32bit version, and Nintendo had developed a 64-bit system for release in 1996. As violent computer games become faster and more three-dimensional, as if players were actually participating in a movie, the line between fantasy and reality gets thinner, and the potential increases for developing a generation addicted to even higher resolution violence in reality.

Although most of the impact of such visual media experience cannot be linearly correlated with specific violent acts, there can be little doubt that the cumulative influence of hours of television watching, video game play and movie mayhem cannot help but influence the perceptual process by which human beings incorporate the world around them into the essence of themselves, and in turn affect the social order as a whole.

CONCLUSION

Film and television are media particularly suited to emotional learning because their language is experientially based. Verbal language facility is cognitively based and takes a great deal of time to master—we learn to read gradually, becoming more and more proficient over years of practice, expanding our thinking into ever-widening circles of complexity and sophistication. As we grow in verbal ability and read more widely, we become aware of different perspectives, of differing philosophies, of false prophets and charlatans, of the multigrained complexity of truth seeking.

Visual media, however, presents a view of reality that simply seems to be there. The world of visual media announces itself to our senses as reality, so that before we are capable of understanding that it is a manipulated and artificially constructed world, before we become experientially sophisticated enough to judge the nuances of manufactured visual "realities," we accept these selfcontained visual worlds as true.

As we add each media experience to our understanding of the world, an image of how the world works grows within us, and, as Boulding suggested, it is this image of the world that determines our actions. Everything we do is relative to this holistic image that acts as an open system, actively seeking invariance, searching for the patterns that will help us make sense of our environment.

There is at present a double norm within the society: one that 15 respects human value, and one that dominates visual media. It is a very adult, very sophisticated thinker who can separate out these never wholly distinct worlds and understand the nuances of their interrelationship. For the child, as for the many adults who write to their favorite soap opera characters as if they actually existed in real life, these worlds begin as one and only gradually, with a great deal of help from thinking adults do they separate into alternate worlds.

Even films that seem tame and acceptable, like Spielberg's Jurassic Park, reflect society's double-think in relation to children and media violence. Despite the fact that the film was made clearly with a children's audience in mind, for example—as evidenced by its ubiquitous marketing tie-ins with McDonald's and toy manufacturers—the film carried a PG-13 warning because of several intensely violent scenes. Ironically, even the rating itself served to increase allure for the children's audience, always hungry to understand the "adult" world. Spielberg himself would not allow his own children to see his film; yet clearly other children's parents did: gross domestic earnings surpassed $300 million and made it one of the top-grossing films of all time.[footnoteRef:3] [3: Entertainment Weekly, 9 July 1995, 101. 10"TV's Turner," 12.]

Even if the violent behavior of children and adults can in specific instances be directly traced to specific media effects, it is clear that the major contribution of media is to the way we see the world. This world image begins to be formed with our earliest experiences, as we read our parents' expressions and mimic them. When visual media is introduced into this world, it contributes to emotional memory, which is never erased. In this way, television and film have contributed substantially to a perceptual climate in which violence has come to be seen as normal simply by virtue of its ubiquity. It is this aspect of media's public trust that caused Ted Turner to observe to a congressional committee in 1993 that "television violence is the single most significant factor contributing to violence in America" and to proclaim himself and other media moguls as murderers.

As our understanding of perceptual process becomes clearer and the preponderance of evidence correlating social and media violence grows, the argument over whether the consumption of violent images causes violence or whether the tendency to violence in people is merely legitimated and glamorized by the pervasiveness of violence in the media seems more and more naive. Both contribute substantially to the picture in our minds that determines the way we perceive reality, the way we interpret the past, and how we project our perception into the future through analogy.

Today the picture that millions of young people have in their minds is filled with a holistic view of violence both as entertainment and as an unavoidable fact of everyday life. In the end, the combination of the two pervasive attitudes—the entertainment value of violence and its inevitability—have both worked to desensitize people to violence and rob them of a sense of control over their own behavioral options. At the same time, practical problem-solving skills are reduced to the lowest level by media's selling of violence as the preferred solution, and violence is glamorized and promoted as a number one entertainment option.

When we are tempted to shrug off the effects of media violence 20 because we ourselves have become inured to it by saying that violence has always been a part of the human scene, or by resigning ourselves to adapting to its pervasiveness in our everyday lives, it is wise to remember that we ourselves are responsible for this world. As Myriam Medzian points out, at least thirty-three different societies exist today in which both war and interpersonal violence are extremely rare. 1 1 Thus violence is far from inevitable, unless we choose to make it so by promoting it. The "New Violence" in media is the harbinger of a new American culture characterized by low interpersonal involvement and by the attitude that violence is an apparently suitable solution to interpersonal conflict, a source of entertainment and enjoyment, and an effective vehicle for personal and social expression. Acceptance of violence is now a deep, shared experience of the young and a way of seeing formed by repeated exposure to media.

Questions

1. Read Brandon Centerwall's conclusion as quoted in the Barry essay (paragraph 5). Is this an acceptable conclusion to his research? You may want to read more about his research before you make your decision. Do you think the study should have taken other factors into account? How does this study indicate how important many people think that images are in creating one's behavior and one's understanding of the world?

2. What evidence does Barry provide to suggest that video games may present an even bigger threat to society than television? In what ways are our interactions with video games different from our interactions with television?

3. Take an informal survey in your class to find out if more males than females play video games. What games do students in your class prefer? About how many hours a day/a week do they play video games? Do your findings correspond to those of the author? What do your findings tell you about the role of video games in our culture?

4. Barry says that "verbal language facility is cognitively based and takes a great deal of time to master" but that we accept the world of visual media to be

11 Robert R. Holt, "Converting the War System to a Peace System," cited in Meriam Medzian, Boys Will Be Boys (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1991), 76.

98 Anne Marie Seward Barry

Media Images and Violence 93

100 Thomas Hine

true before we can even understand it (paragraphs 11—12). Do you agree with this statement and do you think that we understand reading words or seeing images differently? Does either one seem more powerful to you?

5. Write an essay in which you take a position on the fol{owing issue: Laws should be passed restricting the amount of violence permitted on television and in video games. Material that does not meet the criteria should be prohibited from being sold in stores or on the Internet. Do you agree or disagree? Use your own experiences or those you have read about to support your position.