IP: MIT professor goes to DC -- to testify about violence in media

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>
>
>[Yep, that's pretty much the way hearings work. --Declan]
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Fri, 7 May 99 09:30:04 EDT
>From: henry3@MIT.EDU
>To: declan@well.com
>Cc: pmccormi@MIT.EDU
>Subject: Prof. Jenkins Goes to Washington
>
>It was suggested that you would find this account of my testimony before the
>U.S. Senate of interest and so I am passing it along to you. Feel free to
>distribute it on your list.
>
>So many people have asked for the details that I've decided to write out a
>personal narrative that can circulate where-ever anyone wishes.
>
>This is the story of how a mild mannered MIT Professor ended up being called
>before Congress to testify about "selling violence to our children" and what
>it is like to testify.
>
>Where to start? For the past several months, ever since my book, FROM BARBIE
>TO MORTAL KOMBAT: GENDER AND COMPUTER GAMES appeared, I've been getting
>calls to talk about video game violence. It isn't a central focus of the
>book, really. We were trying to start a conversation about gender, about the
>opening up of the girls game market, about the place of games in "boy
>culture," and so forth. But all the media wants to talk about is video game
>violence. Here is one of the most economically significant sectors of the
>entertainment industry and here is the real beach head in our efforts to
>build new forms of interactive storytelling as part of popular, rather than
>avant garde, culture, but the media only wants to talk about violence. These
>stories always follow the same pattern. I talk with an intelligent reporter
>who gives every sign of getting what the issues are all about. Then, the
>story comes out and there's a long section discussing one or another of a
>seemingly endless string of anti-popular culture critics and then a few
>short comments by me rebutting what they said. A few times, I got more
>attention but not most. But these calls came at one or two a week all fall
>and most of spring term. Then, when the Littleton shootings, they increased
>dramatically. Suddenly, we are finding ourselves in a national witch hunt to
>determine which form of popular culture is to blame for the mass murders and
>video games seemed like a better candidate than most. So, I am getting calls
>back to back from the LA TIMES, THE NY TIMES, The Christian Science Monitor,
>The Village Voice, Time, etc., etc., etc. I am finding myself denounced in
>The Wall Street Journal op-ed page for a fuzzy headed liberal who blames the
>violence on "social problems" rather than media images. And, then, the call
>came from the U.S. Senate to see if I would be willing to fly to Washington
>with just a few days notice to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee
>hearings. I asked a few basic questions, each of which feared me with
>greater dread. Turned out that the people testifying were all anti-popular
>culture types, ranging from Joseph Lieberman to William Bennett, or industry
>spokesmen. I would be the only media scholar who did not come from the
>"media effects" tradition and the only one who was not representing popular
>culture as a "social problem." My first thought was that this was a total
>setup, that I had no chance of being heard, that nobody would be sympathetic
>to what I had to say, and gradually all of this came to my mind as reasons
>to do it and not reasons to avoid speaking. It felt important to speak out
>on these issues.
>
>A flashback: When I was in high school, I wore a trenchcoat (beige, not
>black), hell, in elementary school I wore a black vampire cape and a
>medallion around my neck to school. I was picked on mercilessly by the
>rednecks who went to my school and I spent a lot of time nursing wounds,
>both emotional and some physical, from an essentially homophonic
>environment. I was also a sucker for Frank Capra movies -- Mr. Smith Goes to
>Washington most of all -- and films like 1776 which dealt with people who
>took risks for what they believed. I had an amazing high school teacher,
>Betty Leslein, who taught us about our government by bringing in government
>leaders for us to question (among them Max Clevland, who was then a state
>legislature and now a member of the Commerce Committee) and sent us out to
>government meetings to observe. I was the editor of the school paper and got
>into fights over press censorship. And I promised myself that when I was an
>adult, I would do what I could to speak up about the problems of free speech
>in our schools. Suddenly, this was a chance.
>
>I also had been reading Jon Katz' amazing coverage on the web of the
>crackdown in schools across America on free speech and expression in the
>wake of the shootings. Goth kids harassed for wearing subcultural symbols
>and pushed into therapy. Kids suspended for writing the wrong ideas in
>essays or raising them in class discussions. Kids pushed off line by their
>parents. And I wanted to do something to help get the word out that this was
>going on.
>
>So, it didn't take me long to say yes. 
>
>I was running a major conference the next day and then I would have one day
>to pull together my written testimony for the Senate. I didn't have much in
>my own writings I could draw on. I pulled together what I had. I scanned the
>web. I sent out a call for some goth friends to tell me what they felt I
>should say to Congress about their community and a number of them stayed up
>late into the night sending me information. And I pulled an all nighter to
>write the damn thing which was really long because I didn't have time to
>write short. And then, I worked with my assistant, Shari Goldin, to get it
>proofed, edited, revised, and sent off to Congress. And to make arrangements
>for a last minute trip.
>
>When I got there, the situation was ever worse than I had imagined. The
>Senate chamber was decorated with massive posters of video game ads for some
>of the most violent games on the market. Many of the ad slogans are
>hyperbolic -- and self-parodying -- but that nuance was lost on the Senators
>who read them all deadly seriously and with absolute literalness. Most of
>the others testifying with professional witnesses who had done this kind of
>thing many times before. They had their staff. They had their props. They
>had professionally edited videos. They had each other for moral support. I
>had my wife and son in the back of the room. They are passing out press
>releases, setting up interviews, being tracked down by the major media and
>no one is talking to me. I try to introduce myself to the other witnesses.
>Grossman, the military psychologist who thinks video games are training our
>kids to be killers, won't shake my hand when I wave it in front of him. I am
>trying to keep my distance from the media industry types because I don't
>want to be perceived as an apologist for the industry -- even though, given
>the way this was set up, they were my closest allies in the room. This is
>set up so you can either be anti-popular culture or pro-industry and the
>thought that as citizens we might have legitimate investments in the culture
>we consume was beyond anyone's comprehension.
>
>The hearings start and one by one the senators speak. There was almost no
>difference between Republicans and Democrats on this one. They all feel they
>have to distance themselves from popular culture. They all feel they have to
>make "reasonable" proposals that edge up towards censorship but never quite
>cross the constitutional lines. It is political suicide to come out against
>the dominant position in the room.
>
>One by one, they speak. Hatch, Lieberman, Bennett, the Archbishop from
>Littleton.... Bennett starts to show video clips which removed from context
>seem especially horrific. The fantasy sequence from Basketball Diaries
>reduced to 20 seconds of Leo DiCaprio blasting away kids. The opening
>sequence from SCREAM reduced to its most visceral elements. Women in the
>audience are gasping in horror. The senators cover their faces with mock
>dread. Bennett start going on and on about "surely we can agree upon some
>meaningful distinctions here, between CASINO and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN,
>between THE BASKETBALL DIARIES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER..." I am just
>astonished by the sheer absurdity of this claim which breaks down to a pure
>ideological distinction which has neither aesthetic credibility nor any
>relationship to the media effects debate. Basketball Diaries is an important
>film; CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER is a right wing potboiler! Scorsese is bad
>but Spielberg is good?
>
>Meanwhile, the senators are making homophobic jokes about whether Marilyn
>Manson is "a he or a she" that I thought went out in the 1960s. These strike
>me as precisely the kind of intolerant and taunting comments that these kids
>must have gotten in school because they dressed differently or acted oddly
>in comparison with their more conformist classmates.
>
>By this point, we reach the hour when the reporters have to call in their
>stories if they are going to make the afternoon addition and so they are
>heading for the door. It's down to the C-Span camerawoman and a few
>reporters from the game industry trade press.
>
>And then I am called to the witness stand. Now, the chair is something
>nobody talks about. It is a really really low chair and it is really puffy
>so you sit on it and your butt just keeps sinking and suddenly the tabletop
>is up to your chest. It's like the chairs they make parents sit in when they
>go to talk to elementary school teachers. The Senators on the other hand sit
>on risers peering down at you from above. And the whole power dynamics is
>terrifying.
>
>Grossman starts to attack me personally, claiming that a "journalism"
>professor and a "film critic" have no knowledge of social problems. It takes
>me a while for the attacks to sink in because they are so far off the mark.
>I am not a journalism prof. and I am not a film critic. I am a media scholar
>who has spent more than 15 years studying and writing about popular culture
>and I do think I have some expertise at this point on how culture works, how
>media is consumed, how media panics are started,  how symbols relate to real
>world events, how violence operates in stories, etc., etc. and that's what I
>was speaking about.
>
>I am doing OK with all of this. I am surprisingly calm while the other
>people speak, and then Sen. Brownback calls my name, and utter terror rushes
>through my body. I have never felt such fear. I try to speak and can hardly
>get the words out. My throat is dry. I reach for a glass of water and my
>hands are trembling so hard that I spill water all over the nice table. I am
>trying to read and the words are fuzzing out on the page. Most of them are
>handwritten anyway by this point because I  kept revising and editing until
>the last minute. And I suddenly can't read my writing. Cold sweet is pouring
>over me. I have visions of the cowardly lion running down the halls in OZ
>escaping the great blazing head of the wizard. But there's no turning back
>and so I speak and gradually my words gain force and I find my voice and I
>debating the congress about what they are trying to do to our culture. I
>take on Bennett about his distorted use of the BASKETBALL DIARIES clip,
>explaining that he didn't mention this was a film about a poet, someone who
>struggles between dark urges and creativity, and that the scene was a
>fantasy intended to express the rage felt by many students in our schools
>and not something the character does let alone something the film advocates.
>I talked about the ways these hearing grew out of the fear adults have of
>their own children and especially their fear of digital media and
>technological change. I talked about the fact that youth culture was
>becoming more visible but it's core themes and values had remained pretty
>constant. I talked about how reductive the media effects paradigm is as a
>way of understanding consumers relations to popular culture. I attacked some
>of the extreme rhetoric being leveled against the goths, especially a line
>in TIME from a GOP hack that we needed "goth control" not "gun control." I
>talked about the stuff that Jon Katz had been reporting about the crackdown
>on youth culture in schools across the country and I ended with an ad-libed
>line, "listen to your children, don't fear them." Then, waited. 
>
>The Senator decided to take me on about the goths, having had some staff
>person find him a surprisingly banal line from an ad for a goth nightclub
>which urged people to "explore the dark side." And I explained what I knew
>about goths, their roots in romanticism and in the aesthetic movement, their
>nonviolence, their commitment to acceptance,their strong sense of community,
>their expression of alienation. I talked about how symbols could be used to
>express many things and that we needed to understand what these symbols
>meant to these kids. I spoke about Gilbert and Sullivan's PATIENCE as a work
>that spoke to the current debate, because it spoofed the original goths, the
>Aesthetics, for their black garb, their mournful posturing, and said that
>they were actually healthy and well adjusted folks underneath but they were
>enjoying playing dark and soulful. The Senator tried repeating his question
>as if he couldn't believe I wasn't shocked by the very concept of giving
>yourself over to the "dark side." And then he gave up and shuffled me off
>the stand.
>
>The press warmed around the anti-violence speakers but didn't seem to want
>to talk to me. I just wanted to get out of there. I felt no one had heard
>what I had to say and that I had been a poor messenger because I had
>stumbled over my words. But several people stopped me in the hallway to
>thank me. And dozens more have sent me e-mail since having seen it on C-Span
>or heard it on the radio or seen the transcript on the web or heard about it
>from friends. And suddenly I feel better and better about what had happened.
>I had spoken out about something that mattered to me in the halls of
>national power and people out there had heard my message, not all of them
>certainly, but enough. 
>
>I know the fight isn't over -- at least I hope it isn't. There will be more
>chances to speak, but I felt like I had scored some victory just by being
>there and speaking. Someone wrote me that it was all the more powerful to
>have one rational voice amid a totally lopsided panel of extremists. People
>would see this was a witch hunt of sorts. I'd like to believe that. 
>
>THe key thing was I got a statement into the record that was able to say
>more than I could in five minutes and people can read it on the web at:
>http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/0504jen.pdf
>
>What follows is the text of my oral remarks which are rather different from
>the written statement because I was still doing research and writing on the
>airplane.
>
>I am Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. I
>have published six books and more than fifty essays on various aspects of
>popular culture. My most recent books, THE CHILDREN'S CULTURE READER and
>FROM BARBIE TO MORTAL KOMBAT: GENDER AND COMPUTER GAMES deal centrally with
>the questions before this committee. I am also the father of a high school
>senior and the house master of a MIT dormitory housing 150 students. I spent
>my life talking with kids about their culture and I have come here today to
>share with you some of what I have learned.
>
>The massacre at Littleton, Colorado has provoked national soul searching. We
>all want answers. But we are only going to find valid answers if we ask the
>right Questions. The key issue isn't what the media are doing to our
>children but rather what our children are doing with the media. The
>vocabulary of "media effects", which has long dominated such hearings, has
>been challenged by numerous American nd international scholars as an
>inadequate and simplistic representation of media consumption and popular
>culture. Media effects research most often empties media images of their
>meanings, strips them of their contexts, and denies their consumers any
>agency over their use.
>
>William Bennett just asked us if we can make meaningful distinctions between
>different kinds of violent entertainment. Well, I think meaningful
>distinctions require us to look at images in context, not looking at 20
>second clips in isolation. From what Bennett just showed you, you would have
>no idea that THE BASKETBALL DIARIES was a film about a poet, that it was an
>autobiographical work about a man who had struggled between dark urges and
>creative desires, that the book on which it was based was taught in high
>school literature classes, and that the scene we saw was a fantasy which
>expressed his frustrations about the school, not something he acts upon and
>not something the film endorses.
>
>Far from being victims of video games, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had a
>complex relationship to many forms of popular culture. They consumed music,
>films, comics, videogames, television programs. All of us move nomadically
>across the media landscape, cobbling together a personal mythology of
>symbols and stories taken from many different places. We invest those
>appropriated materials with various personal and subcultural meanings.
>Harris and Klebold were darn toward dark and brutal images which they
>invested with their personal demons, their antisocial impulses, their
>maladjustment, their desires to hurt those who had hurt them.
>
>Shortly after I learned about the shootings, I received e-mail for a 16 year
>old girl who shared with me her web site. She had produced an enormous array
>of poems and short stories drawing on characters from popular culture and
>had gotten many other kids nationwide to contribute. Though they were
>written for no class, these stories would have brightened the spirit of
>writing teachers. She had reached into contemporary youth culture, including
>many of the same media products that have been cited in the Littleton case,
>and found there images that emphasized the power of friendship, the
>importance of community, the wonder of first romance. The mass media didn't
>make Harris and Klebold violent and destructive and it didn't make thi girl
>creative and sociable but it provided them both with the raw materials
>necessary to construct their fantasies.
>
>Of course, we should be concerned about the content of our culture and we
>all learn thing from the mass media. But popular culture is only one
>influence on our children's imaginations. Real life trumps media images
>every time. We can shut down a video game if it is ugly, hurtful, or
>displeasing. But many teens are required to return day after day to schools
>where they are ridiculed and taunted and sometimes physically abused by
>their classmates. School administrators are slow to respond to their
>distress and typically can offer few strategies for making the abuse stop.
>As one Littleton teen explained, "Everytime someone slammed them against a
>locker or threw a bottle at them, they would go back to Eric and Dylan's
>house and plot a little more." 
>
>We need to engage in a rational conversation about the nature of the culture
>children consume but not in the current climate of moral panic. I believe
>this moral panic is pumped up by three factors.
>
>1)Our fears of adolescents. Popular culture has become one of the central
>battlegrounds through which teens stake out a claim on their own autonomy
>from their parents. Adolescent symbols from zoot suits to goth amulets
>define the boundaries between generations. The intentionally cryptic nature
>of these symbols often means adults invest them with all of our worst fears,
>including our fear that our children are breaking away from us. But that
>doesn't mean that these symbols carry all of these same meanings for our
>children. However spooky looking they may seem to some adults, goths aren't
>monsters. They are a peaceful subculture committed to tolerance of diversity
>and providing a sheltering community for others who have been hurt. It is,
>however, monstrously inappropriate when GOP strategist Mike Murphy advocates
>"goth control" not "gun control."
>
>2)Adult fears of new technologies. The Washington Post reported that 82
>percent of Americans cite the Internet as a potential cause for the
>shootings. The Internet is no more to blame for the Colombine shootings than
>the telephone is to blame for the Lindbergh kidnappings. Such statistics
>suggest adult anxiety about the current rate of technological change. Many
>adults see computers as necessary tools for educational and professional
>development. But many also perceive their children's on-line time as
>socially isolating. However, for many "outcasts," the on-line world offers
>an alternative support network, helping them find someone out there
>somewhere who doesn't think they are a geek.
>
>3)The increased visibility of youth culture. Children fourteen and under now
>constitute roughly 30 percent of the American population, a demographic
>group larger than the baby boom itself. Adults are feeling more and more
>estranged from the dominant forms of popular culture, which now reflects
>their children's values rather than their own. Despite our unfamiliarity
>with this new technology, the fantasies shaping contemporary video games are
>not profoundly different from those which shaped backyard play a generation
>ago. Boys have always enjoyed blood and thunder entertainment, always
>enjoyed risk-taking and rough housing, but these activities often took place
>in vacant lots or backyards, out of adult view. In a world where children
>have diminished access to play space, American mothers are now confronting
>directly the messy business of turning boys into men in our culture and they
>are alarmed at what they are seeing but the fact that they are seeing it at
>all means that we can talk about it and shape it in a way that was
>impossible when it was hidden from view.
>
>We are afraid of our children. We are afraid of their reactions to digital
>media. And we suddenly can't avoid either. Thee factors may shape the
>policies that emerge from this committee but if they do, they will lead us
>down the wrong path. Banning black trenchcoats or abolishing violent video
>games doesn't get us anywhere. These are the symbols of youth alienation and
>rage -- not the causes.
>
>Journalist Jon Katz has described a backlash against popular culture in our
>high schools. Schools are shutting down student net access. Parents are
>cutting their children off from on-line friends. Students are being
>suspended for displaying cultural symbols or expressing controversial views.
>Katz chillingly documents the consequences of adult ignorance and fear of
>our children's culture. Rather than teaching children to be more tolerant,
>high school teachers and administrators are teaching students that
>difference is dangerous, that individuality should be punished, and that
>self expression should be constrained. In this polarized climate, it becomes
>IMPOSSIBLE for young people to explain to us what their popular culture
>means to them. We re pushing this culture further and further underground
>and thus further and further from our understanding. 
>
>I urge this committee to listen to youth voices about this controversy and
>have submitted a selection of responses from young people as part of my
>extended testimony.
>
>Listen to our children. Don't fear them.
>
>
>Henry Jenkins
>
>
>
>
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