MEDIA VIOLENCE RESEARCH: SHOULD WE CONTINUE OR SHOULD WE ABANDON IT?

(A response paper)

Glenda B. Claborne
Comm 509

Anyone going through even just a fraction of the 70-year history of research on the effects of media violence would not fail to groan over the apparent impotency of the whole enterprise. Surely, it is reasonable to expect research on such an issue as television violence, driven by societal concerns in the first place, to have an impact on media programming, public policy and individuals' use of the media. So, a strong link between television viewing and real-life violence has been documented by a large body of research. So, there are family viewing hours, ratings and report cards, V-chips and other blocking devices. So what? Gerbner and associates keep producing the same, if not worse, figures of violence content in television year after year since 1967. Civic and professional organizations bring up the battle cry against violence here and there, then and now. A politician picks up the cause, rallies the research community to come up with evidence and threatens the media industry to shape up or else. The researchers twiddle with variables in laboratories, in the field, in natural settings and come up with, predictably, inconclusive evidence. "What to do?" moan the legislators. "We told you so, no need to worry," knowingly wag the media men. And so the pattern goes till the next Senator John Pastore or Senator Paul Simon starts beating the gong again.

But why does a futile pattern go on? I was just reading an article by Potter and Warren (1996) on policies protecting children from TV violence. They cited the studies showing a strong link between television violence and subsequent aggression in viewers, the problems encountered when these findings enter the policy debate, and offered some solution by way of redefining violence and content analyses of TV programming. Like so many others (Cook, Kendzierski & Thomas, 1983; Rowland, 1983; Friedlander, 1993) who have touched on the impotency of research on sources of leverage for change, Potter and Warren (1996) must come to the only logical conclusion: The media industry is not likely to change its programming because they need to build audiences and millions are at stake, and so the ball of change is back in the audience's court.

So what does this say to the communication research community? To continue fiddling with definition of violence narrow enough to accommodate the industry's dilemma and broad enough to give politicians and legislators enough to allay public concerns? To continue fiddling with variables of television and real violence for the sake of research? To continue fiddling with the issue of violence because academe itself has stakes in the matter? Does the research community have any criteria for deciding when to branch off from an issue or to abandon it altogether? What drove/drives research in media violence? Does research have an integrity and independence commensurate with its claim for empirical purity or is it just a pawn and a patsy for opportunistic politicians, greedy media moguls and hysterical reformers?

I ask these questions not because I fail to appreciate the rigor, discipline and patience that go into research and into establishing a discipline capable of independent research and judgment but because I believe one should have integrity and courage to part with something that couldn't and shouldn't be in one's domain. On the question of media violence, I suggest that the communication discipline give the issue over to public policy and the humanities if it cannot bear getting muddled by the assumptions and interpretations of politicians and artists.

Personally, I find the interpretations of the humanities closer to reality than the careful calibrations of aggressive behavior by communication researchers. When one considers that a large percentage of the violence in television has been found in programs classified as entertainment or fiction-based, it makes sense to look at the issue of violence through the stories that people want to hear, view and retell themselves. Twitchell (1989), in Preposterous Violence, convincingly presents a parade of violence in various media through history to make the point that violent images have never lost their audiences; they have just found a new medium. One winces looking at the engravings of the 18th century English engraver, William Hogarth. His illustrations of the stages of cruelty, from sticking an arrow into a dog's anus to raping and slitting the throat of a young woman, are shocking even by today's standards. The puppet performances of Punch tossing his baby, killing his wife, Judy, and just about anybody that got in his way and triumphing over the devil himself at the end beat many unjustified violence on TV today. The heart of the matter here is that audiences, especially adolescent males, have always flocked to view these violent images, over and over again, and that older people have always found it necessary to censure such images. Twitchell (1989) argues that these violent images are the "literal and figurative cartoons of human adolescence. In a sense they are the cultural dream protecting us from the biological nightmare" (p.46). However, Twitchell (1989) cautions that he is not arguing for any Aristotelian sense of catharsis in which the audience is purged of passions. He writes, "Preposterous violence is not made up of tragic or purgative rituals and these rituals do not arouse pity or terror, nor do they cleanse. They excite, incite, becalm, delay, and defuse aggression" (p.46). In short, preposterous violence is at once poison and remedy.

Social scientists seem to have so much confidence in changing and shaping human nature almost equal to the illusory optimism of liberalism in eradicating inequality, hierarchy, poverty and ignorance. Yet ironically, social science like liberalism may have actually reduced the individual to a specimen, an experimental object wrested from both his external and internal environments. As a student intending to do research in communication, I call for a reassessment of the philosophical underpinnings of research in media violence. I realize that modern man has abandoned the search for a unifying truth a long time ago and it too is illusory to find a circle that would encompass all that we know to be true. But it is important for me to know where I am starting from, whether from some internal truth from within ourselves or from the external realities as we see it in society. For the issue of media violence, it is time to acknowledge the aggressive nature of man as exhibited throughout history. It is time to understand the ways in which man has tried to contain what he knows are destructive forces in him, either through symbolic images or through the civilizing institutions around him. There must be some way of looking at media violence at the individual, psychological level and along a historical and narrative continuum or who would want to rehash the impotent ritual that has been played out several times in the past 70 years?

In saying this, I realize I am a new student to communication and I may not truly appreciate what goes on in research as I want to believe I do. I do want to be more informed and be able to contribute and build on past research.

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