Essay #6

My mother would never let me have any toy modeled after an instrument of violence. I was not allowed to have so much as a water pistol. I think this was to teach me the meaning of those objects. Guns kill people, read that again, guns kill people. Swords rend flesh and clubs flatten heads, tools of war are no good she taught me. In the eighties computer games were just beginning and my mother wouldn't let me have any part of them either, now I understand why. The horrid images portrayed in these living nightmares of futuristic apocolyspe would frighten anyone sane. Anyone, that is, but our children. Our children are exposed to a daily diet of violence that makes them numb to the absurdity of it all. They are taught from the time that they are around seven or eight that violence is not only cartoonish, it is fun and cool. On television they see killing and maiming, gun violence and rape. In the movies they see even more graphic examples of the worst in human character. In video games they are taught bloodlust, they are taught to thrive in environments where violence is par for the course. In other words, theory becomes practise. Our children have four thousand calories a meal of deep fried carnage and it is only getting worse.

Visual media has always had violence. It started with Punch and Judy, it's emblazoned on the human mind from an early age that people hit one another regularly. In television it hit it's first good stride. We had a new media with which to describe the wonderfully destructive urges we all feel, art represents life after all. We had a new media that would let us live vicariously the feeling of power that violence gives. It started with Westerns. The men would run around and the bullet'ers' would shoot eachother but the bullet'ee's would show no blood or wound, they would just fall down. Later in the episode everone was still alive and just wrapped in bandages or some such ludicrous premise. Then a little later when shot the cowboy died. Then in the sixties we prefered more sex in our advertising but by the late seventies violence was beginning to become entertainment again. We had cop dramas with many deaths or murders per episode. We had crime dramas where they had to solve a murder. We had the A-Team where thousands of rounds flew but no one was ever actually shot. Eventually we had educational television. Did you ever watch this stuff? It is about weapons we have, weapons we had, or weapons we want. There are myriad documentaries about world war 2 yet few about the life of Mother Theresa and Ghandi, even on the biography channel. There are movies about those kind of people.

Movies started before even television had become ensconsed in our homes. People went to see them even before they had sound. A man played a piano score timed to coincide with major points in the film until they finally figured out how to sync a soundtrack. Then the great war movies began. Howard Hughes made his world war one airplane epic and people felt what being a combat pilot was like. John Wayne let us feel what it was like to fight in the Great War and then the Westerns started again. Clint Eastwood taught us to enjoy shooting down foes for justice, Charles Bronson let us all be vigilantes. We learned how to enjoy slaughtering teens at campsites in the Friday the Thirteenth movies. Stephen King showed us how it would feel to kill your whole family in the Shining and how it felt to telekinetically kill a whole prom full of people in Carrie. Always before these acts a jusitification, a circumstance that made the violence seem reasonable was presented and then the acts made a sort of sense. Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone starred in good examples of this. In their films we lived the experience of punishing those who have offended justice, we give pain to those who have hurt us. Their message is always the same.

Then in the early eighties we were given video games. The first was 'Pong', it was addictive and non-violent. That wasn't enough, eventually we developed the Atari and it came with a game cartridge that had over ten games on it. Some warplanes, some tanks, and a few sports. Then the nineties brought us Nintendo, Playstation, and X-Box. This is where video games reached the pinnacle of realism. The games allowed us to combat eachother through the realm of anonymity known as the internet. We could shoot, stab, slash and hack eachother to bits in any fictional reality we wished. We could kill eachother as our favorite movie star or in the context of our favorite Sci-Fi heroes world. We had 'UnReal Tournament' which was known as a 'First Person Shooter' where you moved through the game in a first person perspective and shot and killed enemies up close. The idea of the game was a tournament to the death with the galaxies hardest fighters. We had 'Real Time Strategy' where you moved and developed whole armies and fought them against eachother. People the world over log on even now for the chance to kill eachother in the cyber world. Now we have Grand Theft Auto. These games involve becoming the head of a crime organization by stealing, killing, sleeping with prostitutes and taking drugs.

The question is does the popular media influence our minds? The answer is not simple. One could speculate that poplular entertainment simply represents a progressively more violent civilization but the entertainment seems to outmatch the violence in civilization to a great degree. If you want to understand the effect of the media in peoples lives, however, you might steer clear of the facts and figures. The empirical data would confuse the issue and at it's heart is a question no numbers can describe anyway, a moral one. The effect of the media is best described by the media itself. I witnessed a gruesome and unimaginable beating on the news today. Apparently a young girl had been posting negative statements about some other girls on the internet and those girls had read them. They invited her to one of their houses, locked her in a room and beat her into unconciousness. They waited until she woke up, and then beat her into unconsciousness again. They beat her so badly that she could not see or hear for two days later and the worst part is that they taped it. They taped it with digital camera and then posted it on the internet so that everyone could see it. Why would they tape violence and post it for all to see? Simple, the media is where that kind of thing belongs. You tell me, what is the media doing to us?