Yes, we had terrible news today.
Personally, I don’t really believe the idea that cultural products including music, movies, and video games with violent images have a strong cultivation effect that might tacitly incites people to a crime. But when we face some tragic cases like the massacre at Virginia Tech, it’s easy to find how media try to link video games (such as first-person shooting game ) and the crime.
Reuters already mentioned video games this afternoon. (read) What sort of discourses on the relation between video games and crime cases will be developed through media this time?
3 responses so far ↓
1 Soyoun // Apr 16, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Whooa, I’ve been watching ABC nightline and they just talked about the effect of video game quite a lotttttttttt. Interesting.
2 Rob // Apr 17, 2007 at 12:16 pm
In today’s Media Notes, Howard Kurtz links to a blog post by “Zohra,” who writes, “When this is all said and done, we will likely have an unhappy young person who probably had an unhealthy obsession with guns, violence, gory video games, and over the top blood fest movies. There is a pattern, and we are stupid to fail to recognize it.”
Kurtz’s comment: “Why wait to find out who the killer is when we can conjure him up in advance?”
3 Katie // Apr 22, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I get so conflicted about this sort of thing. When I was in high school they were always going after the kids that dyed their hair or listened to loud rock music for the same reasons. They thought were all going to be damaged for like by Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” for goodness sakes.
I think, obviously, we’re always looking for easy solutions or things to blame. I don’t think loud music, hair dye, video games, or violent media makes people pick up guns. If they did, we have kids every where doing it, and we don’t.
On the other hand, I remember the conversations we had with Professor Leets in our Research Methods class last semester. Where essentially she was explaining that there’s a lot of evidence out there that encountering large amounts of violence does impact the viewer, particularly children. I don’t think that “impact” necessarily means it creates violence and killing, but I do worry about smaller ways it affects us all. Just like I worry about the ways that unnaturally skinny models impact teenage girls. Then again, I worry even more about the impact of covering only crime and violence in urban areas has on the poor and people of color, or even more importantly, on the people who never see those neighborhoods except when they’re being shown as stereotypes on television.
For myself, I think the violence question is just one piece of the broader issue of media depictions versus reality, and how the constant exposure to false realities may have consequences. The solution, I think, always comes back to media literacy. To parents and authority figures needing to make sure they teach children that media isn’t reality, that people need to respect each other, and that children need to think about what they’re seeing, instead of just accepting it.
I don’t know though. That’s the rosy ideal solution anyway. I’m not sure our society is that capable of fixing it at the moment, however. Not given the profit motive and the power we still give money.
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