I am the
Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and a Professor
of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I hold a Masters in Communication Studies from the University
of Iowa and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. For the past seventeen years, I have made
the study of American popular culture the central focus of my
teaching and research. To date, I have published six books and
more than fifty essays on various questions concerning the aesthetic,
social, and cultural impact of popular culture. My first book,
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture,
focused on the
subculture of media fans and their particular investments in
and creative reworking of the contents of popular culture. [1]
My two most recent books, The Children's Culture Reader and
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games
deal centrally with the questions that are before this committee.
[2] I am now doing initial research for a
study of the ways that digital media are shifting our relationships
with popular culture, a project that will particularly focus
on the experience of children and youth in a "hypermediated
culture."
Many of
the others testifying on this panel come from traditions of
experimental or quantitative research into "media effects."
I represent a different tradition in media studies which employs
more "qualitative" methods, including those derived from anthropology,
history, and literary analysis. My research seeks to address
the meanings that get attached to cultural symbols and the ways
that people in specific social and cultural contexts interact
with media. I am taking the time to spell out these different
approaches to research because they shape how various witnesses
on this panel think about media and also shape what kinds of
"evidence" or "findings" they present. In this extended statement,
I will outline some of the ways this research can contribute
to our understanding of the relationship between popular culture
and youth violence.
My testimony
before this committee also draws on more personal experiences.
I am the father of a high school senior whose engagement with
and insights about popular culture and digital media have contributed
tremendously to my understanding of the relationship of American
teens to our changing media environment. Moreover, I have served
for the last four years as the housemaster of Senior House,
an MIT dormitory, which brings into close daily contact with
150 young people, including a fair share of "goths" and "computer
nerds." The Littleton shootings have been a major focus of discussion
within the dorm in recent weeks and their thoughts and reactions
have played a central role in helping me understand what is
at stake for adolescents in the context of our current "moral
panic" over violent media. [For a sample of their reactions
to the incident, see Appendix
One] Whatever policy decisions emerge from these hearings,
we are going to be most effective in confronting the root causes
of youth violence if we seriously attempt to understand contemporary
popular culture and why it is meaningful to the youth who consume
it. This understanding is going to come from listening to and
taking seriously what young people have to say.
The shootings
at Colombine High School in Littleton, Colorado several weeks
ago have justly sparked a period of national soul searching. This
incident was shocking and tragic; it seems to defy any rational
understanding. As parents, educators, citizens, political leaders,
we demand to know how such a thing could have happened and we
desperately want to believe we can come up with policies or laws
that can prevent it from happening again. We want ANSWERS. But
we are only going to come up with valid answers if we start by
asking the right sets of QUESTIONS. So far, most of the conversation
about Littleton has reflected a desire to understand what the
media are doing to our children. Instead, we should be focusing
our attention on understanding what our children are doing with
media.
As more
information becomes available to us, it is becoming increasingly
clear that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two Littleton
shooters, had an especially complex relationship to popular
culture. Various pundits have pointed their fingers at video
games, violent movies, television series,
popular music, comic books, websites, youth subcultures, and
fashion choices to locate the cause of their violent behavior.
[3]. What have we learned so far? Harris
and Klebold played video games. Not surprising -- roughly 80
percent of American boys play video games. [4]
Harris and Klebold spent a great deal of time on line. According
to Don Tapscott's Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net
Generation, 11 percent of the world's computer users are
under the age of 15. Thirty six percent of American teens use
an online service at home, 49 percent at school, and 69 percent
have been on-line at least once in their lifetime, compared
to 40% of the total population that has been on-line. [5]
They engaged in on-line gaming. According to Jon Katz, estimates
of online gamers in the United States alone run as high as 15
to 20 million people. [6] Harris and Klebold
watched a range of films, including The Matrix, which
has been the top money earner in four of the last five weeks.
They listened to various popular music groups, some relatively
obscure (kmfdm), some highly successful (Marilyn Manson). They
may have borrowed certain iconography from the Goth subculture,
a subculture that has a history going back to the 1980s and
which has rarely been associated with violence or criminal activity.
They may have worn black trench coats. None of these cultural
choices, taken individually or as an aggregate, differentiates
Harris and Klebold from a sizable number of American teenagers
who also consumed these same forms of popular culture but have
not gone out and gunned down their classmates. The tangled relationship
between these various forms of popular culture makes it impossible
for us to determine a single cause for their actions. Culture
doesn't work that way.
Cultural
artifacts are not simple chemical agents like carcinogens that
produce predictable results upon those who consume them. They
are complex bundles of often contradictory meanings that can
yield an enormous range of different responses from the people
who consume them.
Like the
rest of us, Harris and Klebold inhabited a hypermediated culture.
The range of media options available to us has expanded at a
dramatic rate over the past several decades. We see this expansion
everywhere -- the introduction of CDs led to an expansion of
the range of popular music kept in circulation; the introduction
of cable television has dramatically increased the spectrum
of television programs we can watch; the introduction of digital
media introduces us to a much broader array of ideas and stories
that we would have encountered in a world of centralized gatekeepers;
niche marketing has led to an explosion of new specialized magazines,
many of them targeting youth. New media technologies are being
introduced at an astonishing rate enabling a more participatory
relationship to media culture. In such a world, each of us make
choices about what kinds of media we want to consume, what kinds
of culture are meaningful or emotionally rewarding to us. None
of us devote our attention exclusively to only one program,
only one recording star, only one network, or only one medium.
People define their own media environment through their own
particular choices from the huge menu of cultural artifacts
and channels of communication that surround us all the time.
Some teens are drawn towards the angst-ridden lyrics of industrial
music; others are happily jitterbugging to neo-swing. Selling
popular culture to our kids isn't quite the same thing as selling
cigarettes to our kids. When it comes to popular culture, we
all "roll our own." We cobble together a personal mythology
of symbols, images, and stories that we have adopted from the
raw materials given us by the mass media, and we invest in those
symbols and stories meanings that are personal to us or that
reflect our shared experiences as part of one or another subcultural
community. In the case of Harris and Klebold, they drew into
their world the darkest, most alienated, most brutal images
available to them and they turned those images into the vehicle
of their personal demons, their antisocial impulses, their psychological
maladjustment, their desire to hurt those who have hurt them.
In this
case, those choices and investments had lethal results.
Banning
black trenchcoats or violent video games doesn't get us anywhere.
The black trench coats or the song lyrics are only symbols.
To be effective in changing the nature of contemporary youth
culture, what we want to get at are the meanings that are associated
with those symbols, the kinds of affiliations they express,
and more importantly, the feelings of profound alienation and
powerlessness that pushed these particular kids (and others
like them) over the edge. Consuming popular culture didn't make
these boys into killers; rather, the ways they consumed popular
culture reflected their drive towards destruction. For most
kids most of the time, these forms of popular culture provide
a normal, if sometimes angst-ridden, release of frustration
and tension. Sometimes, indeed most often, as the old joke goes,
a cigar is only a cigar and a black trenchcoat is only a raincoat.
Symbols
don't necessary have fixed or universal meanings. Symbols gain
meanings through their use and circulation across a variety
of contexts. Some of those meanings are shared, some of them
are deeply personal and private, but once we perceive a need
to express a particular feeling or idea, human beings are pretty
resourceful at locating a symbol that suits their needs.
It is relatively
easy to get rid of one or another symbol. Some symbols -- the
swastika for example --maintain power over thousands of years,
although they have often radically shifted meaning over that
time. But most of the time, symbols have a very limited shelf
life. Half the time media activists focus their energies on
combating examples of popular culture that have little or no
commercial appeal to begin with. Computer games such as Custer's
Revenge, Death Trap, or Postal, which have been the center
of so much debate about video game violence had only limited
commercial success and are far from the bread and butter of
the video game industry, which is, for the most part, far more
dependent on its sports-focused games than on combat games.
The images found in such marginal works are certainly outrageous,
but they are so outrageous that they attract few customers;
they alienate their potential market and collapse of their own
accord. It is much harder to get rid of the feelings that those
symbols express.
I don't
need to remind you how many violent crimes have been inspired
by one or another passage from the Bible. When we hear
such stories about religious fanatics committing violent crimes,
we recognize that reading the Bible did not cause these
murders, even though some of the violent images that got stuck
in the killers' minds originated in one or another passage of
scripture. When we encounter such situations, we say that these
criminal actions resulted from a misreading of the Bible,
that they took those images out of context, that the killers
invested those passages with their own sickness. The same claim
can be made about the works of popular culture. Popular films
and television programs may not have the spiritual depth of
the Bible, they will almost certainly not survive as
long, but they are still complex works that express many different
ideas and lend themselves to many different uses and interpretations.
Sometimes one or another image from mass culture does become
part of the fantasy universe of a psychotic, does seem to inspire
some of their antisocial behavior, but we need to recognize
that these images have also been taken out of context, that
they have been ascribed with idiosyncratic meanings. Despite
the mass size of the audience for some of the cultural products
we are discussing, there are tremendous differences in the way
various audience members respond to their influence.
Shortly after I learned about
the Colombine High School shootings, I received e-mail from a
16-year-old web mistress who had written to thank me about some
comments I made in an interview on media fandom. She gave me the
URL for her website and what I found there was truly inspirational.
She had produced an enormous array of poems and short stories
drawing on characters from one or another popular television series,
film, or comic book series. She had organized her friends -- both
in her local community and elsewhere in the country -- to write
their own stories and poems. Most of them showed a careful crafting
and an expressive quality that most high school composition teachers
would love to foster in their students. She had made her own selections
from the range of popular culture aimed at American youth. For
example, she was especially drawn towards more realistic stories
dealing with the social relations between teens, to such television
series as My So-Called Life, Dawson's Creek, Beverley Hills
90210, and Party of Five, but she was also drawn towards some
series that have Gothic overtones, such as Buffy the Vampire
Slayer or Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comic books. She
reached into contemporary youth culture and found there images
that emphasized the power of friendship, the importance of community,
the wonder of first romance. She used the web to create a space
where she and other teens could share what they had created with
each other. The mass media didn't make Harris and Klebold violent
and destructive any more than it made this girl creative and sociable.
These teens drew on the stories that circulate within popular
culture as resources for expressing things that were within them.
These teens used media as a tool for communicating their perceptions
of the world. Their websites look very different because they
are very different teens. Even when they are using some of the
same images, they don't mean the same things to them.
Mass media
is a notoriously blunt instrument. It doesn't do a very good
job of catering to our individual tastes and needs. We don't
always subscribe to all of the values contained within a particular
mass-produced narrative. Even when we are passionate about a
particular program or CD, it's pretty likely there will be aspects
that frustrate, disappoint, annoy, or even actively offend us.
I've observed in my research on media fandom that fan activity
is born of a mixture of fascination and frustration. We are
drawn to a particular media artifact because it seems to be
the best available vehicle for exploring some issue that is
deeply important to us, because it entertains us or provides
us with pleasure in a way that most other available choices
in the marketplace do not. If they did not fascinate us on some
level, we would not devote so much of our attention and energy
to them. But, if they did not frustrate us on some level, we
would also not spend much time scrutinizing, critiquing, and
rewriting them. These media artifacts don't fully meet our needs
and so we're pushed towards a more intense and often a more
critical engagement with them. We want to rewrite them to more
perfectly reflect our own desires and fantasies. And these competing
feelings of fascination and frustration give rise to the fan
websites that are becoming increasingly common on the web.
It is very
hard to tell what these artifacts and myths mean from a position
outside the cultural community that has grown up around them.
All we can see are the symbols; we can't really get at the meanings
that are attached to them without opening some kind of conversation
with the people who are using those symbols, who are consuming
those stories, and who are deploying those media.
For methodological
reasons, empirical research on "media effects" chooses not to
address any of these issues, tending to bracket from consideration
issues about media content, context, and form as beyond its
purview. Empirical researchers can only work with simple variables.
Consequently, they offer only crude insights into the actual
consequences of consuming violent media within specific real
world contexts. They can tell us that certain media images stimulate
neural responses, creating a state of tension or arousal. They
can measure certain attitude shifts after consuming media images.
But, in both cases, it takes a series of interpretive leaps
and speculations to move from such data to any meaningful claim
that media images causes real world behavior. Most "media effects"
researchers pull back from making any confident claims about
the possible links between popular culture and youth violence,
because decades of research on media violence still yields contradictory
and confusing results.
Media effects
research typically starts from the assumption that we know what
we mean by "media violence," that we can identify and count
violent acts when we see them, that we can choose or construct
a representative example of media violence and use it as the
basis for a series of controlled experiments. Under most circumstances,
our children don't experience violent images abstracted from
social or narrative contexts. Exposing children to such concentrated
doses of decontextualize violence focuses their attention on
the violent acts and changes the emotional tone which surrounds
them. Storytelling depends upon the construction of conflict
and in visual based media, conflict is often rendered visible
by being staged through violence. Stories help to ascribe meaning
to the violent acts they depict. When we hear a list of the
sheer number of violent acts contained on an evening of American
television, it feels overwhelming. But, each of these acts occurs
in some kind of a context and we need to be attentive to the
specifics of those various contexts. When Leonardo diCaprio's
character kills himself at the end of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet, it means something different than when
his character fantasizes about anti-social violence in The
Basketball Diaries. Some works depict violence in order
to challenge the culture that generates that violence; other
works celebrate violence as an appropriate response to social
humiliation or as a tool for restoring order in a violent and
chaotic culture or as a vehicle of patriotism. Some works depict
self-defense; others acts of aggression. Some make distinctions
between morally justifiable and morally unjustifiable violence;
some don't. We know this, of course, because we are all consumers
of violent images. We read murder mysteries; we watch news reports;
we enjoy war movies and westerns; we go to operas and read classic
works of western literature. So many of the films, for example,
which have been at the center of debates about media violence
-- A Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers,
The Basketball Diaries, and now The Matrix -- are
works that have provoked enormous critical debates because of
their thematic and aesthetic complexity, because they seem to
be trying to say something different about our contemporary
social environment and they seem to be finding new images and
new techniques for communicating their
meanings. Depicting violence is certainly not the same thing
as promoting violence. Cultural studies research tells us we
need to make meaningful distinctions between different ways
of representing violence, different kinds of stories about violence,
and different kinds of relationships to violent imagery. [7]
Media effects
research often makes little or no distinction between the different
artistic conventions we use to represent violent acts. At its
worst, media effects research makes no distinction between violent
cartoons or video games that offer a fairly stylized representation
of the world around us and representation of violence that are
more realistic. Other researchers, however, show that children
learn at an early age to make meaningful distinctions between
different kinds of relationships between media images and the
realm of their own lived experience. [8]
These studies suggest that children are fairly adept at dismissing
works that represent fantastic, hyperbolic, or stylized violence
and are more likely to be emotionally disturbed by works that
represent realistic violence and especially images of violence
in documentary films (predator-prey documentaries, war films)
that can not be divorced from their real world referents. Such
research would suggest that children are more likely to be disturbed
by reports of violent crimes on the evening news than representations
of violence in fictional works.
One of
the most significant aspects of play is that play is divorced
from real life. Play exists in a realm of fantasy that strips
our actions of their everyday consequences or meanings. Classic
studies of play behavior among primates, for example, suggest
that apes make basic distinctions between play fighting and
actual combat. In some circumstances, they seem to take pleasure
wrestling
and tousling with each other and in other contexts, they might
rip each other apart in mortal combat. [9]
We do things in our fantasies that we would have no desire to
do in real life, and this is especially true of fantasies that
involve acts of violence. [10] The pleasure
of play stems at least in part from escapism. The appeal of
video game violence often has more to do with feelings of empowerment
than with the expression of aggressive or hurtful feelings.
Our children feel put down by teachers and administrators, by
kids on the playground; they feel like they occupy a very small
space in the world and have very limited ability to shape reality
according to their needs and desires. Playing video games allows
them to play with power, to manipulate reality, to construct
a world through their fantasies in which they are powerful and
can exert control. The pleasure stems precisely from their recognition
of the contrast between the media representations and the real
world. It is not the case that media violence teaches children
that real world violence has no consequence. Rather, children
can take pleasure in playing with power precisely because they
are occupying a fantastic space that has little or no direct
relationship to their own everyday environment. Fantasy allows
children to express feelings and impulses that have to be carefully
held in check in their real world interactions. Such experiences
can
be cathartic, can enable a release of tension that allows children
to better cope with their more mundane frustrations. [11]
The stylized and hyperbolic quality of most contemporary entertainment
becomes one of the primary markers by which children distinguish
between realistic and playful representations of violence.
Let us
be clear: while I am questioning both the methodology and the
conclusions employed by a central tradition of media effects
research, I am not arguing that children learn nothing from
the many hours they spend consuming media; I am not arguing
that the content of our culture makes no difference in the shape
of our thoughts and our feelings. Quite the opposite. Of course,
we should be concerned about the content of our culture; we
should be worried if violent images push away other kinds of
representations of the world. The meanings youths weave into
their culture are at least partially a product of the kinds
of fantasy materials they have access to and therefore we should
subject those materials to scrutiny. We should encourage children
to engage critically with the materials of their culture. But,
popular culture is only one influence on our children's fantasy
lives. As the Littleton case suggests, the most powerful influences
on children are those they experience directly, that are part
of their immediate environment at school or at home. In the
case of Harris and Klebold, these influences apparently included
a series of social rejections and humiliations and a perception
that adult authorities weren't going to step in and provide
them with protection from the abuse directed against them from
the "in crowd."
We can
turn off a television program or shut down a video game if we
find what it is showing us ugly, hurtful, or displeasing. We
can't shut out the people in our immediate environment quite
so easily. Many teenagers find going to school a brutalizing
experience of being required to return day after day to a place
where they are ridiculed and taunted and sometimes physically
abused by their classmates and where school administrators are
slow to respond to their distress and can offer them few strategies
for making the abuse stop. Media images may have given Harris
and Klebold symbols to express their rage and frustration, but
the media did not create the rage or generate their alienation.
What sparked the violence was not something they saw on the
internet or on television, not some song lyric or some sequence
from a movie, but things that really happened to them. When
we listen to young people talk about the shootings, they immediately
focus on the pain, suffering, and loneliness experienced by
Harris and Klebold, seeing something of their own experiences
in the media descriptions of these troubled youths, and struggling
to understand the complex range of factors which insure that
they are going to turn out okay while the Colorado adolescents
ended up dead. [See Appendix One] If
we want to do something about the problem, we are better off
focusing our attention on negative social experiences and not
the symbols we use to talk about those experiences.
Some of
the experts who have stepped forward in the wake of the Littleton
shootings have accused mass media of teaching our children how
to perform violence --as if such a direct transferal of knowledge
were possible. The metaphor of media as a teacher is a compelling
but ultimately misleading one. As a teacher, I would love to
be able to decide exactly what I want my students to know and
transmit that information to them with sufficient skill and
precision that every student in the room learned exactly what
I wanted, no more and no less. But, as teachers across the country
can tell you, teaching doesn't work that way. Each student pays
attention to some parts of the lesson and ignores or forgets
others. Each has their own motivations for learning. Whatever
"instruction" occurs in the media environment is even more unpredictable.
Entertainers don't typically see themselves as teaching lessons.
They don't carefully plan a curriculum. They don't try to clear
away other distractions. Consumers don't sit down in front of
their television screens to learn a lesson. Their attention
is even more fragmented; their goals in taking away information
from the media are even more personal; they aren't really going
to be tested on what they learn. Those are all key differences
from the use of video games as a tool of military training and
the use of video games for recreation. The military uses the
games as part of a specific curriculum with clearly defined
goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and
have a clear need for the information and skills being transmitted,
and there are clear consequences for not mastering those skills.
None of this applies to playing these same or similar games
in a domestic or arcade context.
So far,
the media response to the Littleton shootings has told us a
great deal more about what those symbols mean to adults than
what they mean to American youth, because for the most part,
it is the adults who are doing all of the talking and the youth
who are being forced to listen. Three key factors have contributed
to the current media fixation on the role of popular culture
in the shootings:
- Adult
fears of adolescents and their culture. Tremendous emotion
surrounds the transition from child to adult. The teens struggle
with issues of autonomy, the adult with issues of mortality.
For thousands of years, our mythology has told stories of
adults who cast out their own children because they fear that
they will kill them and take their place. What those stories
express is an age-old process of transition between generations.
Teenagers want to break free from their parents earlier, on
average, than parents want to turn loose of their children,
but the tug-of-war between those impulses is central to the
process of coming of age within our culture. Popular culture
has increasingly become a vehicle for the complex feelings
surrounding this key transitional point in the human life
cycle. Teenagers are drawn towards popular culture as a means
of defining their self identities (seeing cultural symbols
as vehicles of self expression and individualization) and
their relationship to their peer culture (seeing cultural
symbols as means of signaling their affiliation with others
who share their tastes, experiences, values, or interests).
The Black trenchcoats associated with the Littleton shooting
function on both levels, signaling the wearer's refusal to
conform to certain modes of dress sanctioned by adult authorities
and preferred by the "in crowd" and expressing membership
in an alternative social community, however small and isolated
that group must have felt.
Adolescents
often choose symbols to demark the differences between their
generation and those who came before, whether those symbols
are the zoot suits of the 1940s, the duck tails of the 1950s,
the love beads of the 1960s, or the goth garb of the 1990s.
As part of that process, youth are often attracted to images
that are "shocking" or "offensive" to their parents. When
we look at such symbols, we often find that their most important
content is the repudiation of adult tastes. In the 1970s,
British punks used the swastika as a symbol, not
because they embraced Nazism, but because they knew this
symbol was so powerfully offensive to a generation of adults
who came of age during World War II. [12]
The same can be said about the supernatural or death-related
imagery associated with the goth subculture.
I asked
a 24 year old graduate student who had a long history of
close involvement with the goth movement what I should tell
this committee about the goths. Her response speaks for
itself:
In
high school, before there was even the label 'goth', some
of the disenfranchised youth started to hang out together
to give ourselves a safe place to be depressed. Really,
that is how I remember it. We were all fed up with not fitting
in, not being happy, not being athletic, and so forth, and
EXTREMELY fed up with being picked on by those who were.
So, we started to band together as a support group. Left
to ourselves, we listened to depressing music, watched depressing
movies, and generally moped about. We also started wearing
black, which at the time was mostly to distinguish ourselves
from the normals of the school (the 80's were a very pastel
decade) than to make a real statement.
Over
the years, 'goth' has evolved into a much more coherent
genre. It has its own dance clubs, record labels, bands,
fashion sense and required reading list. But it's still
basically about the same thing. People want a safe space
to explore the more depressing aspects of the world they
live in. They don't want to feel guilty for not being
happy all the time, they don't want to be told to get
on Prozac, and they don't want to force themselves to
put on masks for the benefit of the people around them.
Goths,
in my experience, are more into exploring their own pain
than inflicting any on other people. They would rather
sit in the dark and contemplate their own misery than
set about trying to hurt anyone else. I know that sounds
like a horrible generalization, but as far as being goth
is concerned it is much nobler to glory in your own pain
than to go out and harm other people because you're not
happy. The goths I know don't initiate fights, they don't
date rape, they don't carry guns, they don't pick on others,
they don't force confrontations. They spend a lot of time
complaining that the rest of the world 'doesn't understand'
them, but they don't really want to go out of their way
to make people understand. They have their own interests
and really just want to be left to them.
Most
people get scared by the symbols that accompany being
Gothic - the black clothes, candles, ankhs, vampire symbology
and so forth. Most of this, in the simplest sense, can
be attributed to the Gothic belief that other times and
places were far more gentle and accepting of the sorrows
of life. The ankh is a badge of being Gothic for many
reasons -it is the Egyptian symbol of life (a rather positive
symbol at that), it stands for a people who viewed their
entire worldly existence as a stepping stone to a happier
world beyond death.
Which
brings up the famous Gothic fascination with death. Most
people don't realize that, when goths talk or obsess over
the topic of death, they're talking about their own final
experience on Earth. The Gothic attitude is that death
is our last ride, and we only get one chance at it. It
is to be revered and a natural part of being human, not
feared and hidden from view. The Gothic focus on death
has nothing to do with murder or the experience of others.
Strange
aside: I was just on the phone with my Mother, who was
very distressed when I came home after my first year of
college wearing Gothic fashion and listening to Gothic
music. But after seeing it in me and my friends and learning
about it, she had this to say. "The people I'm least afraid
of in the world are the Goth kids. I was afraid of it
when you first started because I thought you'd be going
to wild sex orgies with whips and chains, and I think
most people don't realize that those things aren't what
being Gothic is about. You guys only wanted to sit around,
watch movies and drink coffee." (which, incidentally,
is pretty much how my mom spends all of her free time)
Contemporary
youth culture appears to many adult observers to be overwhelmingly
dark and pessimistic --but this is hardly a recent phenomenon.
The original model for the goths were the romantics (such
as Lord Byron or Percy Shelly) and the aesthetics (such
as Oscar Wilde and August Beardsley). In reading contemporary
descriptions of the goths, one is reminded of the lyrics
to a song from Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, Patience,
which was written as a spoof of the morbid self-absorption,
languid moping, and loud proclamations of doom and despair
associated with the aesthetic movement. Yet, Gilbert and
Sullivan recognized that most such behaviors and attitudes
were something of sham, a series of poses and pretenses
calculated to establish one's membership within a subcultural
community. Their comic opera suggests that the aesthetic
movement had embraced a series of symbol that meant something
quite different to them than to those outside their little
circle.
The
symbols of adolescent culture often have a certain hyperbolic
quality that reflects the urgency felt by youth who see
their lives undergoing profound and rapid changes and who
need someway of sharing their uneasiness with the world.
Adolescent symbols often divide the world into extreme blacks
and whites, and if their parents have chosen to define the
"white" side, then they are going to explore the "dark side"
on their own. This does not mean that our children are being
drawn to devil worship and demonology, only that they are
constructing fantasies on a symbolic terrain designed to
contrast as strongly as possible with the familiar world
of their own upbringing. They want to become themselves
and often that means becoming someone other than their mother
or father.
To
some degree, all of this is perfectly normal, perfectly
healthy, and all but inevitable. Most kids left to their
own devices find their way back to their parents, accept
their proper place in the adult world, regain some equilibrium
once this process is over. Yet, knowing this doesn't always
make it any easier to cope with adolescents in your family
or in your neighborhood. On a bad day, the best adolescents
can be hurtful and disrespectful. They call our bluff and
reveal our hypocrisies; they push back too hard sometimes
and we are often unprepared for the blows they deliver onto
us. They aren't always eager to explain things to us and
in fact, they take pleasure in our befuddlement when confronting
their culture. Youth symbols are often cryptic to adults,
making sense only within the context provided by membership
within the youth subculture, and adults are correct to feel
vaguely threatened by those symbols, since part of what
they are expressing is the desire of youth to define themselves
in opposition to their parent's culture.
Yet,
the cryptic nature of these symbols often means adults invest
them with all of our worst fears, all of our own anxieties
about the process of our children breaking away from us
and becoming their own persons. Because we don't understand
what these symbols mean, we make them mean what we most
fear that they mean. A certain hysteria develops that comes
bubbling to the surface whenever we find an incident which
seems to give some degree of credibility to our fears. Few
of the adult commentators on the shootings have much direct
knowledge of the forms of popular culture they are discussing;
they can only look at the symbols and make assumptions about
what they mean. We have been given a series of images, ripped
from any meaningful context, and described by "experts"
who are often profoundly ignorant of their place in youth
culture. We are not making even the most gross distinctions
between different youth movements and their goals, values,
contexts, and followings. Harris and Klebold were initially
labeled as goths, though it is increasingly clear that they
had little or no direct affiliation with this subculture
and that their values were totally opposed to the tolerance
of diversity and pacifism that are central to the goth's
definition of themselves. Such a muddled map of the landscape
of youth culture is not a meaningful basis for forming social
policy. Unless you move beyond such gross generalizations
and deal with these symbols in more specific contexts, these
hearings are more likely to fan the growing hysteria than
to yield any meaningful public policy.
- Adult
fears of new technologies. According to a survey in The
Washington Post last week, 82 percent of Americans cite
the internet as a potential cause of the shootings. [13]
The internet is no more to blame for the Columbine shootings
than the telephone is to blame for the Lindbergh Kidnapping.
The internet is a channel of communication just like the telephone;
it can be used to heal or to hurt. What such statistics suggest
is the degree to which adults are anxious about the current
rate of technological change. Writers have noted for several
years now that young people are responding to the participatory
potential of digital media in profoundly different ways that
their parents have. Children are the fastest growing demographic
group on the internet. In his book, Virtuous Reality,
Jon Katz writes: "Children are at the epicenter of the information
revolution, ground zero of the digital world. They helped
build it, they understand it as well as, or better than, anyone
else.... Children in the digital age are neither unseen nor
unheard. In fact, they see and hear more than children ever
have. They occupy a new kind of cultural space. They're citizens
of a new order." [14] Their parents
often do not understand the nature of these new media, do
not understand why their children find these on-line communities
so attractive, and do not understand how their children seem
so free and comfortable navigating digital environments that
the adults find to so terribly intimidating. Our children
seem to be going places where we can not follow them. Even
where adults have direct personal experience with digital
media, there is a fundamental difference in how you think
about the computer depending upon whether, like most of the
adult population, you initially experienced it as a tool of
the workplace or the classroom or whether, as this younger
generation has, you initially experience it in the context
of your recreational or social life.
Many
adults want children to spend time working with their computers
because they see them as necessary tools for educational
and professional development. There has been an enormous
push to wire our classroom as well as concern about those
children being left behind by the digital revolution, those
who lack access to technologies that can shape their future.
But, many adults also perceive the amount of time children
spend on the computer as a form of addiction which potentially
isolates them from others. To use Joseph Lieberman's evocative
phrase, they perceive the computer as the "nightmare before
Christmas," as a threat to their relationships with their
children and to their offspring's mental health. These parents
and adult leaders fail to recognize that most of the time
their children are on the computer, they are engaging in
a profoundly social activity. The computer has become a
central point of access to their peer culture. For many
kids, like Harris and Klebold, who feel isolated in their
own schools, who have become outcasts or social pariahs,
going on-line becomes a way of forming alternative social
support networks, of finding someone out there somewhere
who doesn't think you are a gross geek --even if that person
lives on the other side of the country or the other side
of the planet. Yes, our children can fall into bad company
on-line, as they can in real life, but the internet has
expanded the potential that our children will be able to
find their way into a good and supportive community because
they are not restricted to the people in their own immediate
geographic area.
We
thus need to move beyond our technophobic reactions to unfamiliar
media and instead try to develop a more sophisticated understanding
of what our children are doing when they go on-line. Research
on young people's relationship to digital technology is
still at its early stages and may not yet allow us to make
meaningful generalizations, but it seems clear that going
on-line liberates children from some of the limitations
of their immediate environment, gives them access to an
expanded range of ideas and information, encourages a more
participatory relationship to their culture and their government,
empowers them to ask important questions of adult authorities,
and makes it possible to distribute the products of their
reactive impulses to a much larger public. In the long term,
such shifts in their perception of themselves and the world
around them will have a profound impact on their future
roles as citizens, workers, consumers, and parents.
- The increased
visibility of youth culture. A dramatic increase in the birthrate
in the wake of the Second World War generated a huge demographic
bubble we now call "the Baby Boom." Sociologists are suggesting
that America once again is undergoing a dramatic increase
in the number of children and youth in relation to the adult
population. At the present moment, roughly 30 percent of the
American population were born between 1977 and 1997, compared
to those born between 1946 and 1964 (the so-called Baby Boom)
which constitutes 29 percent of the current population and
those born between 1965 and 1976
(the so-called Generation X) who constitute 16 percent of
the population. [15] This demographic
shift is already being felt in terms of the impact of youth
tastes upon mass media content. More and more films, television
shows, and other media products are being made to appeal to
youth tastes. Adults are feeling more and more estranged from
the dominant forms of popular culture, which now reflect their
children's values rather than their own.
Moreover,
youth culture is more exposed to adult scrutiny than ever
before. Video games have
emerged as an entertainment genre in the context of children's
diminished access to real world play spaces. [16]
When I was growing up in suburban Atlanta in the 1960s,
there were numerous backlots where we could play largely
outside of adult control and supervision. These back lots
were where "boy culture" took shape. What E. Anthony Rotundo
calls "boy culture" emerged in the context of the growing
separation of the male public sphere and the female private
sphere in the wake of the industrial revolution. [17]
Boys were cut off from the work life of their fathers and
left under the care of their mothers. According to Rotundo,
boys escaped from the home into the outdoors play space,
freeing them to participate in a semi-autonomous "boy culture"
which cast itself in opposition to maternal culture:
Where women's sphere offered kindness, morality, nurture
and a gentle spirit, the boys' world countered with energy,
self-assertion, noise, and a frequent resort to violence.
The physical explosiveness and the willingness to inflect
pain contrasted so sharply with the values of the home that
they suggest a dialogue in actions between the values of
the two spheres ó as if a boy's aggressive impulses, so
relentlessly opposed at home, sought extreme forms of release
outside it; then, with stricken consciences, the boys came
home for further lessons in self-restraint. (Rotundo, p.37)
The
boys took transgressing maternal prohibitions as proof they
weren't "mama's boys." Rotundo argues that this break with
the mother was a necessary step towards autonomous manhood.
In
the late twentieth century, children have a diminished access
to real world play spaces for many different reasons: there
is less and less space in our increasing urban and suburban
culture that is not developed; more and more children live
in apartment complexs and do not have backyards; more and
more people feel anxious about the safety of their children
playing in public parks and in their neighborhoods. Video
games offer these latchkey children a virtual playspace
that enables them to engage in competitive or exploratory
play within the safety of their own homes; video games promise
children a "complete freedom of movement" that contrasts
sharply with their direct experience of domestic confinement.
In doing so, they transmit many of the values of traditional
"boy culture" into this technological environment. Much
as earlier kids gained recognition from their peers for
their daring, often proven through stunts (such as swinging
on vines, climbing trees, or leaping from rocks as they
cross streams) or through pranks (such as stealing apples
or doing mischief on adults), video games allow kids to
gain recognition for their daring as demonstrated in the
virtual worlds of the game, overcoming obstacles, beating
bosses, and mastering levels. The central virtues of the
19th century "boy culture" were mastery and self-control.
The central virtues of video game culture are mastery (over
the technical skills required by the games) and self-control
(manual dexterity). Traditional "boy culture" was hierarchical
with a member's status dependent upon competitive activity,
direct confrontation and physical challenges. The boy fought
for a place in the gang's inner circle, hoping to win admiration
and respect. Twentieth century video game culture can also
be hierarchical with a member gaining status by being able
to complete a game or log a big score. Far from a "corruption"
of the culture of childhood, video games show strong continuities
to the boyhood play fondly remembered by previous generations.
There
is a significant difference, however. The 19th century "boy
culture" enjoyed such freedom and autonomy precisely because
their activities were staged within a larger expanse of
space, because boys could occupy an environment largely
unsupervised by adults. Nineteenth century boys sought indirect
means of breaking with their mothers, escaping to spaces
that were outside their control, engaging in secret activities
they knew would have met parental disapproval. The mothers,
on the other hand, rarely had to confront the nature of
this "boy culture" and often didn't even know that it existed.
The video game culture, on the other hand, occurs in plain
sight, in the middle of the family living room, or at best,
in children's rooms.
Mothers
come face to face with the messy process by which western
culture turns boys into men, and it becomes the focus of
open antagonisms and the subject of tremendous guilt and
anxiety.
Similarly,
Harris and Klebold's websites exposed their darkest thoughts,
fantasies, and plans to public scrutiny. They were hidden
in plain sight, there for anyone to see. Some neighbors
brought the website to the attention of the local police
well before the shootings occurred. Several organizations
committed to monitoring hate groups knew of their existence
and had records of their ramblings in their files. The police
did not adequately respond to that knowledge; adults didn't
take their fantasies seriously enough. Indeed, if we had
developed a better grasp of contemporary youth culture and
its various symbols, we might have been able to meaningfully
distinguish between normal adolescent restlessness and the
signs of an emotionally disturbed personality. But the fact
that their plots and schemes were out there on the web,
rather than scribbled in a diary hidden under their bed,
suggests that this new technology makes it possible for
us to see and know more about our sons and daughters than
ever before. So much of the coverage of this youth culture
emphasizes the degree to which it is hidden from adult view,
but actually, the opposite is the case. We are frightened
because the youth culture is being brought into our view
for the first time. If we are ignorant of contemporary youth
culture, it can only be described as willful ignorance in
a world where children are playing out their violent fantasies
under their parents' noses and posting their aggressive
desires onto the world wide web.
The media backlash
against popular culture in the wake of the Littleton shootings
reflects these three factors: our generational anxiety about the
process of adolescence, our technophobic reaction about our children's
greater comfort with digital technologies, and our painful discovery
of aspects of our children's play and fantasy lives which have
long existed but were once hidden from view. Read in this context,
the materials of youth culture can look profoundly frightening,
but much of what scares us is a product of our own troubled imaginations
and is far removed from what these symbols mean to our children.
All of
the above suggests a basic conclusion: banning specific media
images will have little or no impact on the problem of youth
crime, because doing so gets at symbols, not at the meanings
those symbols carry and not at the social reality that gives
such urgency to teens' investments in those cultural materials.
A model that reduces such complex cultural phenomenon to a series
of crude stimuli and responses doesn't provide much guidance
in how to actually respond to our changing media environment.
What we need to do is learn more than we have so far about what
are children are doing with these new media, what place the
contents of popular culture have assumed in their social and
cultural life, and what personal and subcultural meanings they
invest in such symbols. The best way to do that is to create
opportunities for serious conversations about the nature of
our children's relationships with popular culture. One project
which sets a good example for such discussions is the ìSuperhero
TV Projectî conducted by Ellen Seiter at the University of California-San
Diego. Seiter recognized the centrality of superhero cartoons,
games, comics, and action heroes to preschool children and recognized
the recurring concerns parents
and teachers had about the place of those materials in the children's
lives. [18] Seiter and her graduate
students worked with teachers to encourage classroom activities
that center around these superhero myths. Students were encouraged
to invent their own superheroes and to make up stories about
them. Students discussed their stories in class and decided
that they would collaborate in the production of a superhero
play. Through the classroom discussions about what kinds of
physical actions could be represented in their play, teachers
and students talked together about the place of violence in
the superhero stories and what those violent images meant to
them. Through such conversations, both students and teachers
developed a much better understanding of the role of violent
imagery in popular entertainment.
Such open-minded
and exploratory exchanges seem vital as we struggle to understand
why our children are so invested in these images. We should
be prepared to learn, for example, that violent images are far
less central to their experience of these stories than they
are to our perception of them. Children and adolescents may
take violent images for granted, not because they are desensitized
to violence, but because they aren't especially interested in
the violence. What
draws them to these stories might have to do with the larger
than life heroics of their protagonists, with the intensity
of emotion and experience these programs offer, with the heady
rush of rapid action and flashy visual style. In researching
my recent book on gender and computer games, I stumbled onto
the Quake Grrlz movement. [19] These
young women in their teens and early twenties were, like Harris
and Klebold, involved in on-line gaming, designing their own
combat arenas, "combating" others who shared their seemingly
"blood-thirsty" tastes and interests. What drew these young
women to games like Quake and Doom, however, wasn't
that you could see blood spurt when you shot your opponents
but simply that the digital environment, for the first time,
allowed women to aggressively compete with men without regard
to the physical differences between the genders. These women
were taking great pleasure in beating the boys at their own
games; they experienced the aggressive on-line play as a vehicle
of empowerment, arguing that learning to play fantasy combat
as a child would help them prepare --mentally and emotionally
--for professional lives where they would have to compete with
men. One of the women explained, "Maybe it's a problem...that
little girls DON'T like to play games that slaughter entire
planets. Maybe that's why we are still underpaid, still struggling,
still fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the mettle to
take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller
battles we face everyday." Playing these games had led these
women to form on-line communities that offered technical and
moral support to other women, that staged critical debates about
those aspects of contemporary fighting games that displeased
these women, that foregrounded the accomplishments of women
in the game industry, and that helped to organize consumer activism
campaigns to insure a better match between popular culture and
their own needs and interests.
Writing
for the slashdot.com website, journalist Jon Katz has described
a fundamentally different reaction to popular culture in high
schools across America in the wake of the Littleton shootings
(appendix two). Schools are shutting down student access to
the net and the web. Parents are cutting their children off
from access to their on-line friends or forbidding them to play
computer games. Students are being suspended for coming to school
displaying one or another cultural symbol (black trench coats,
heavy metal T-shirts). Students are being punished or sent into
therapy because they express opinions in class discussions or
essays that differ from the views about the events being promoted
by their teachers. Guidance counselors are drawing on checklists
of symptoms of maladjustment to try to ferret out those students
who are outsiders and either force them into the mainstream
or punish them for their dissent. The various letters Katz has
reproduced through his column make for chilling reading because
they suggest the consequence of adult ignorance about youth
culture and their intolerance of any form of expression that
differs from their own norms and values. Rather than teaching
students to be more tolerant of the diversity they encounter
in the contemporary high school, these educators and administrators
are teaching their students that difference is dangerous, that
individuality should be punished, and that self expression should
be curbed. In this polarized climate, it becomes impossible
for young people to explain to us what their popular culture
means to them without fear of repercussion and reprisals. We
are pushing this culture further and further underground where
it will be harder and harder for us to study and understand
it. We are cutting off students at risk from the lifeline provided
by their on-line support groups.
We all
want to do something about the children at risk . We all want
to do something about the proliferation of violent imagery in
our culture. We all want to do something to make sure events
like the Littleton shootings do not occur again. But repression
of youth culture is doomed not only to fail but to backfire
against us. Instead, we need to take the following steps:
- We need
to create contexts where students can form meaningful and
supportive communities through their use of digital media.
Sameer Parekh, a 24-year-old software entrepreneur, has offered
one such model through his development of the High School
Underground website (http://www.hsunderground.com).
His site invites students who feel ostracized at school to
use the web as a means of communicating with each other about
their concerns, as a tool of creative expression and social
protest, as the basis for forming alliances that leads to
an end of the feelings of loneliness and isolation. (See Appendix
Three) We
need to have more spaces like High School Underground that
provide a creative and constructive direction for children
who are feeling cut off from others in their schools or communities.
A number of websites have been built within the goth subculture
to explain its perplexing images to newcomers, to challenge
its representation in the major media, and to rally support
for the victims of the shootings. (See Appendix
Four)
- We also
need to work on building a more accepting and accommodating
climate in our schools, one which is more tolerant of difference,
one which seeks to understand the cultural choices made by
students rather than trying to prohibit them open expression.
A core assumption behind any democratic culture is that truth
is best reached through the free market of ideas, not through
the repression of controversial views. Popular culture has
become a central vehicle by which we debate core issues in
our society. Our students need to learn how to process and
evaluate those materials and reach their own judgements about
what is valuable and what isn't in the array of media entering
their lives. They need to do this in a context that respects
their right to dignity and protects them from unreasoned and
unreasonable degrees of abuse. What should have rang alarm
bells for us in the aftermath of the Littleton shooting is
how alone and at risk students can feel in their schools and
how important it is for us to have a range of different activities,
supported by caring and committed teachers, which can pull
all of our students into the school community and not simply
those the school values because of their good grades, good
sports skills, or good conduct. All signs are that Harris
and Klebold were enormously talent and created kids who never
found an outlet where they could get respect for what they
created from the adults in their community.
- We need
to provide more support for media education in our schools.
Given the centrality of media in contemporary life, media
issues need to be integrated into all aspects of our K-12
curriculum, not as a special treat, but as something central
to our expectations about what children need to learn about
their environment. Most contemporary media education is designed
to encourage children to distance themselves from media culture.
The governing logic is "just say no to Nintendo" and "turn
off your television set." Instead, we need to focus on teaching
children how to be safe, critical, and creative users of media.
Research suggests
that when we tell students that popular culture has no place
in our classroom discussions, we are also signaling to them
that what they learn in school has little or nothing to say
about the things that matter to them in their after school
hours. [20]
- For this
new kind of media literacy to work, our teachers and administrators
need to be better informed about the nature of popular culture
and their students' investments in media imagery. Such understanding
cannot start from the assumption that such culture is meaningless
or worthless, but has to start from the recognition that popular
culture is deeply significant to those who are its most active
consumers and participants. The contents of that culture shift
constantly and so we need to be up to date on youth subcultures,
on popular music, on popular programs.
- We need
to provide fuller information to parents about the content
of media products so that they can make meaningful and informed
choices about what forms of popular culture they want to allow
into their homes. They need to know what their children are
consuming and why it appeals to them. The ratings system introduced
by the game industry goes a long way towards addressing this
concern, establishing a consistent base-line against which
to measure the content of video games. But the ratings system
for games and for television needs to be more nuanced, needs
to provide more specific information. We also need to create
more websites where parents respond to the games and other
media products they have purchased and share their insights
and reactions with other parents.
- We need
to challenge the entertainment industry to investigate more
fully why violent entertainment appeals to young consumers
and then to become more innovative and creative at providing
alternative fantasies that satisfy their needs for empowerment,
competition, and social affiliation.
Sources
[1]
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991). return
[2]
Henry Jenkins (Ed.), The Children's Culture Reader (New
York: New York University Press, 1998); Justine Cassell and
Henry Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender
and Computer Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). return
[3]
For a representative overview, see, for example, "Outsider Culture:
A Guide to Terms that Emerged from Colorado Tragedy," Boston
Globe, Friday April 23 1999, p.c1.] return
[4]
Cassell and Jenkins, op. cit. return
[5]
Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation
(New York:McGraw-Hill, 1998). return
[6]
Jon Katz, "The Price of Being Different," posted Thursday April
29, @12:15PM EDT on slashdot.com (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/29/0124247&mode=thread&threshold=0)
return
[7]
For a useful overview of why social and cultural contexts of
violent images matter, see Marsha Kinder, "Contextualizing Video
Game Violence: From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 to Mortal
Kombat 2, " in Patricia M. Greenfield and Rodney R. Cooking
(Eds.) Interacting with Video (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996).
return
[8]
For an overview of this research, see Bob Hodge and David Tripp,
Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1986). return
[9]
For an important collection on the meaningfulness of play for
humans and animals, see J. S. Bruner, A. Jolly, and K. Sylva
(Eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution (New
York: Penguin, 1976). return
[10]
For a useful series of discussions about fantasy (sexual and
otherwise), see Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography
and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove/Atlantic,
1996). return
[11]
For the role of play as a vehicle for staging and releasing
antisocial impulses, see Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer,
The House of Make-Believe: Children's Play and The Developing
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)
return
[12]
For useful overviews of the role of cultural symbols in defining
youth subcultures, see Dick Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning
of Style (London: Routledge, 1993); Ken Gilder and Sarah
Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge,
1997). return
[13]
Shannon Henry and John Schwartz, "Teens Use Technology Their
Way," The Washington Post, Saturday, April 24, 1999;
Page A1 return
[14]
Jon Katz, Virtuous Reality (New York: Random House, 1997),
p. 173. return
[15]
Tapscott, p. 21. return
[16]
Henry Jenkins, "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as
Gendered Play Spaces," in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
(Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer
Games (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), pp. 262-297. return
[17]
E. Arthur Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity
From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic,
1994). return
[18]
See, for example, Ellen Seiter, Television and New Media
Audiences (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). See,
also, http://www.southmoon.com/info_herotv.html.
return
[19]
See "Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back," in
Cassell and Jenkins (op. cit.), pp.328-341. return
[20]
Hodge and Tripp, op. cit. return
Appendix One
Excerpts
from an on-line discussion among MIT students:
- We talk
about making school safe for all every day, and that means
the geeks, too.
Is
it so wrong for everyone to be safe from getting picked
on?
Speaking
from personal experience, the geeks & nerds who do conform
are survivalists, and the rest of the geeks & nerds individualists.
And
the conforming geeks/nerds are still very lonely.
Personally,
I think teachers and other adult mentors really play a big
role in preventing most geeks & nerds from going over the
edge and blow up the schools. From my own experience, without
all of my teachers' support, I might have went ahead and
blew up the school myself, too.
The
human mind seeks attention anyway it could get. Being inventive
& ingenuous, man goes into many niches over his lifetime
in his quest for recognition. It is because of this quality
that we have as colorful & varied society as we do today.
And
it is also this quality that drove a significant portion
of the high schoolers into dressing all black & listening
to alternative music.
And,
unfortunately, it is also this quality that drove the jocks
& others into picking upon these other alternative people
in school.
- Most
of the people I'm really close to were bullied/abused/harassed
to the point of tears, drugs, therapy, suicidal thoughts,
anger, hatred, etc. throughout our lives in school, both public
and private. However, none of us killed anyone. In my case,
it certainly wasn't due to lack of weapons. In high school,
we had guns in the house, locked in a safe to which I had
the combo, and I went to the shooting range with my father.
I had a recurring fantasy of cutting off the hair of the girl
who's locker was next to mine, because she fucking brushed
it in my face every fucking day. But I didn't kill her. Why
not? Part of it is the timing of certain influences. I had
really supportive older sisters. One of my friends had an
older brother whom he worshipped who became a militantly racist
skinhead, and he followed right along. I was deeply disappointed
at what I considered the loss of that friend.
Anyway,
personal anecdotes aside, I think the abuse that goes on
in schools played a part in this. I hate the fact that this
is written off as a normal part of adolescence. The "concerned
adults" involved should think about preventing this abuse,
rather than waiting until these kids are on the verge of
actually snapping before they intervene. Also, I think there
was something much more fundamentally wrong with these kids,
either with their home lives and influences, some inherent
mental problems, or both.
- I think
the fundamental part of my existence has always been an intense
feeling of isolation, which manifested itself in all my different
phases of conformity.
Teased
from a young age simply because the kids knew they could
get a rise out of me- I tried and tried to be like everyone
else. Got the Gap pants, the jean jacket and everything.
Purposefully did average on spelling tests and the like.
I'd always be accepted for a little while, then it'd become
apparent that I was somehow different (maybe I tried too
hard) then the circle would come full round and I'd get
ostracized.
Once
I joined the jocks, once the punk rockers, once the drama
kids, once the college students, once the towers club, whatever.
It
didn't ever come down to expression of the self. It was
always a desire to connect with others. And it still pervades
my actions. And I still feel isolated. Although admittedly,
MIT (and my own personal achievements) has given me just
enough of an ego to be able to say "Fuck You" and not let
the isolation affect me. But hey, I still cry about it.
I kind
of empathize with the Col. kids....To do what they did,
they couldn't have been part of any group, not even trench-coat
wearing doom players (I was one of those kids once too),
they were completely alone (and maybe they suffered from
some major chemical imbalance too).
- Those
of you in the house that know me at all and especially those
of you that have seen me in person lately know that something
like this thing in Colorado would've and did bother me a lot.
A couple
of words on it:
1)
I have to start by saying that it was an utterly atrocious
and despicable series of acts that would've made me happy
to see the gunmen be executed if they hadn't already killed
themselves.
2)
However, a number of things about the whole incident have
been bothering me. To begin with, the media coverage of
the incident has made me so outraged I've barely been able
to restrain myself. I have never been so angered by the
combination of poor journalism (in lack of proper facts),
buzzword use, and general tastelessness.
The
first two of these issues are incredibly apparent in the
media's depiction of the gunmen. Immediately, the gunmen
were completely bogusly classified as "goths" simply because
they wore black trenchcoats and supposedly listened to Marilyn
Manson. This is the most absurd thing I could've ever imagined.
If wearing black trenchcoats made one goth or a killer,
than half of Boston in the winter time are crazied goth
maniacs.
Additionally,
if the media had done even a modicum of research, they would've
learned that Marilyn Manson is so far from goth its ridiculous.
This is like saying Gwar, White Zombie, Tool, or hell, Dolly
Parton is goth.
This
instant "goth" classification was replicated throughout
the media and spread like wild fire. It's kind of interesting,
with a few rare exceptions (such an article today in the
NY Post), no retraction of this error was made. BTW, as
an aside, numerous goth boys and girls at high schools all
over the U.S. today were ridiculed and beaten up even more
than usual...I doubt you'll hear anything about that either.
But
besides the extreme slandering of goths, not only was the
goth subculture dragged out as the whipping boy on this
one...here's a partial list of everything else I've heard
it blamed on:
- Marilyn
Manson
- KMFDM
- Hitler
and the Nazis
- anarchism
- role-playing
games (again...man, feels like the 80s again, no?)
- guns
- computer
games
- trench
coats
- gangster
rap
And
a dozen other of the media's favorite whipping boys.
The
media also couldn't have been more tacky and tasteless.
The very next day on the NY Times website, a virtual walk
through of the Columbine high school marking rooms where
the gunmen killed people was on line. Am I the only one
who finds this incredibly in poor taste?! Also, the very
next day, every talk show was doing a special on the shootings,
from Oprah to Leeza, and so forth. And from the snippets
I saw of any of them, they were all so ridiculously manipulative
of the sad emotions surrounding the incident for ratings
it was sickening.
3)
Certain issues regarding the incident have been bugging
me a lot, and actually kept me near sleepless on some issues.
Here's the thing, I, like a couple others of you I suspect,
was horribly made fun of in school. For eleven years of
my life, I was the subject of nearly constant ridicule,
remarks, physical violence, you name it. I was every bully's
wet dream ñ a little scrawny kid with red hair, braces,
freckles, glasses, the works. And thinking back, I do remember
numerous times throughout my youth when while being mocked,
ridiculed, tortured, whatever, that I thought to myself
"man, I'm gonna kill that sucker".
So
what made me different than these kids in Colorado? Why
*didn't* I flip out and go on a killing spree, and why *did*
they? This seems like a deceptively simple question at first
-- "they were sickos" -- but it really isn't. I mean it's
like the old bumper sticker someone pointed out to me recently:
"Bigots aren't born bigots." Now, while I place almost all
the blame of the incident on the two gunmen, I still have
to wonder... What events occurred in my life that prevented
me from doing something like this that didn't occur in theirs?
Or vice versa, what events occurred in their lives that
I never encountered that made them lash out in the manner
they did? It really isn't a simple question...
4)
Finally, ever since the incident, every single time I turn
on the TV, there's another psychologist talking about: a)
how he saw it coming, but no one would listen to him, b)
the "warning signs" if your kid might be ready to snap and
turn violent. Now, quite frankly, when I heard about this,
I wasn't too surprised. I was shocked at the size of it,
and I will always be utterly disgusted by the entire incident,
but I wasn't too surprised...I seem to hear about incidents
like this every week with just a much lower body count.
However, it's the (b) of above that bothers me the most.
I get
a sick feeling whenever I see these cheap 2-bit psychologists
tell the warning signs of your child is going to snap and
whatever show their on puts in on the air with some slick
computer graphics. For not only are they incredibly broad
and encompassing, such that almost everyone I know fits
them, they are completely the wrong goal. Why does no one
understand that when these incidents happen time and time
again, in each case, the kids doing this are in massive
amounts of pain from something and incredibly angry about
something. Parents and teachers shouldn't be looking for
"once these students are in pain and troubled, here's some
signs that they might snap", instead, it should be a step
before that. There should be warning signs for "the student
is starting to become hurt and angry" (ie., not once he's
hurt and angry, THEN trying to look for those that might
lash out violently).
The
mind set is just completely wrong. return1
return2
Appendix
Two
Posted
by Jon Katz on Monday April 26, @12:26PM EDT
In the
days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went
on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly
ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks,
nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation
than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witch
hunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All
weekend, after Friday's column here, these voiceless kids --
invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their
own schools -- have been e-mailing me with stories of what has
happened to them in the past few days. Here are some of those
stories in their own words, with gratitude and admiration for
their courage in sending them. The big story out of Littleton
isn't about violence on the Internet, or whether or not video
games are turning out kids into killers. It's about the fact
that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids,
high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values
and anger.
The big
story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the
TV talk shows. It wasn't whether the Net is a place for hate-mongers
and bomb-makers, or whether video games are turning your kids
into killers. It was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings
has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent,
and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion,
cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage.
From Buffy
the Vampire Slayer to Todd Solondz's Welcome To The Dollhouse,
and a string of comically-bitter teen movies from Hollywood,
pop culture has been trying to get this message out for years.
For many kids -- often the best and brightest -- school is a
nightmare.
People
who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky
ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated,
sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values
- unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are exalted, while
the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiousity
- are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the Trenchcoat
Mafia left was to ensure that this message got heard, by a society
that seems desperate not to hear it.
Minutes
after the "Kids That Kill" column was posted on Slashdot
Friday, and all through the weekend, I got a steady stream of
e-mail from middle and high school kids all over the country
-- especially from self-described oddballs. They were in trouble,
or saw themselves that way to one degree or another in the hysteria
sweeping the country after the shootings in Colorado.
Many of
these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs
-- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange
and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal,
to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was to be dangerous.
Schools
all over the country openly embraced Geek Profiling. One group
calling itself the National School Safety Center issued a checklist
of "dangerous signs" to watch for in kids: it included mood
swings, a fondness for violent TV or video games, cursing, depression,
anti-social behavior and attitudes. (I don't know about you,
but I bat a thousand).
The panic
was fueled by a ceaseless bombardment of powerful, televised
images of mourning and grief in Colorado, images that stir the
emotions and demand some sort of response, even when it isn't
clear what the problem is.
The reliably
blockheaded media response didn't help either. Sixty Minutes
devoted a whole hour to a broadcast on screen violence and its
impact on the young, heavily promoted by this tease: "Are video
games turning your kids into killers?" The already embattled
loners were besieged.
"This is
not a rational world. Can anybody help?" asked Jamie, head of
an intense Dungeons and Dragons club in Minnesota, whose private
school guidance counselor gave him a choice: give up the game
or face counseling, possibly suspension. Suzanne Angelica (her
online handle) was told to go home and leave her black, ankle-length
raincoat there.
On the
Web, kids did flock to talk to each other. On Star Wars
and X-Files mailing lists and websites and on AOL
chat rooms and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded countless
countless stories of being harassed, beaten, ostracized and
ridiculed by teachers, students and administrators for dressing
and thinking differently from the mainstream. Many said they
had some understanding of why the killers in Littleton went
over the edge.
"We want
to be different," wrote one of the Colorado killers in a diary
found by the police. "We want to be strange and we don't want
jocks or other people putting us down." The sentiment, if not
the response to it, was echoed by kids all over the country.
The Littleton killings have made their lives much worse.
"It was
horrible, definitely," e-mailed Bandy from New York City. "I'm
a Quake freak, I play it day and night. I'm really into
it. I play Doom a lot too, though not so much anymore.
I'm up till 3 a.m. every night. I really love it. But after
Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking
to me like I could come in and kill them. It wasn't like they
were really afraid of me - they just seemed to think it was
okay to hate me even more? People asked me if I had guns at
home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse
for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people
like me."
It wasn't
just the popular who were suspicious of the odd and the alienated,
though.
The e-mailed
stories ranged from suspensions and expulsions for "anti-social
behavior" to censorship of student publications to school and
parental restrictions on computing, Web browsing, and especially
gaming. There were unconfirmed reports that the sale of blocking
software had skyrocketed. Everywhere, school administrators
pandered and panicked, rushing to show they were highly sensitive
to parents fears, even if they were oblivious to the needs and
problems of many of their students.
In a New
Jersey private school, a girl was expelled for showing classmates
a pocket-knife. School administrators sent a letter home:
In light
of the recent tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, we all share a
heightened sensitivity to potential threats to our children.
I urge you to take this time to discuss with your children the
importance of turning to adults when they have concerns about
the behavior of others."
This solution
was straight out of 1984. In fact, this was one of the
things it's protagonist Winston was jailed for: refusing to
report his friends for behavior that Big Brother deemed abnormal
and disturbing.
Few of
the weeks' media reports - in fact, none that I saw - pointed
out that the FBI Uniform Crime reports, issued bi-annually,
along with the Justice Departments reports (statistical abstracts
on violence are available on the Department's website and in
printed form) academic studies and some news reports have reporters
for years now.
Violence
among the young is dropping across the country, even as computing,
gaming, cable TV and other media use rises.
Unhappy,
alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools, voiceless in
media, education and politics. But theirs are the most important
voices of all in understanding what happened and perhaps even
how to keep it from happening again.
I referred
some of my e-mailers to peacefire.org, a children's rights website,
for help in dealing with blocking and filtering software. I
sent others to freedomforum.org (the website Free!) for help
with censorship and free speech issues, and to geek websites,
especially some on ICQ.com where kids can talk freely.
I've chosen
some e-mailers to partially reprint here. Although almost all
of these correspondents were willing to be publicly identified
- some demanded it - I'm only using their online names, since
some of their stories would put them in peril from parents,
peers or school administrators.
From Jay
in the Southeast:
"I stood
up in a social studies class -the teacher wanted a discussion
-- and said I could never kill anyone or condone anyone who
did kill anyone. But that I could, on some level, understand
these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day after day,
slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn
how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes,
especially when you come to see that you're hated only because
you're smart and different, or sometimes even because you are
online a lot, which is still sound cool to many kids?
After the
class, I was called to the principal's office and told that
I had to agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be
expelled from school, as I had expressed ?sympathy? with the
killers in Colorado, and the school had to be able to explain
itself if I ?acted out?. In other words, for speaking freely,
and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird geek,
but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with violence
in America."
From Jason
in Pennsylvania: "The hate just eats you up, like the molten
metal moving up Keanu Reeve's arm in the The Matrix. That's
what I thought of when I saw it. You lose track of what is real
and what isn't. The worst people are the happiest and do the
best, the best and smartest people are the most miserable and
picked upon. The cruelty is unimaginable. If Dan Rather wants
to know why those guys killed those people in Littleton, Colorado,
tell him for me that the kids who run the school probably drove
them crazy, bit by bit? That doesn't mean all those kids deserved
to die. But a lot of kids in America know why it happened, even
if the people running schools don't."
From Andrew
in Alaska: "To be honest, I sympathized much more with the shooters
than the shootees. I am them. They are me. This is not to say
I will end the lives of my classmates in a hail of bullets,
but that their former situation bears a striking resemblance
to my own. For the most part, the media are clueless. They're
never experienced social rejection, or chosen non-conformity.
Also, I would like to postulate that the kind of measures taken
by school administration have a direct effect on school violence.
School is generally an oppressive place; the parallels to fascist
society are tantalizing. Following a school shooting, a week
or two-week crackdown ensues, where studentsí constitutional
rights are violated with impunity, at a greater rate than previous."
From Anika78
in suburban Chicago:
"I was
stopped at the door of my high school because I was wearing
a trenchcoat. I don't game, but I'm a geekchick, and I'm on
the Web a lot. (I love geek guys, and there aren't many of us.)
I was given a choice - go home and ditch the coat, or go to
the principal. I refused to go home. I have never been a member
of any group or trenchcoat mob or any hate thing, online or
any other, so why should they tell me what coat to wear?
Two security
guards took me into an office, called the school nurse, who
was a female, and they ordered me to take my coat off. The nurse
asked me to undress (privately) while the guards outside the
door went through every inch of my coat. I wouldn't undress,
and she didn't make me (I think she felt creepy about the whole
thing).
Then I
was called into the principal's office and he asked me if I
was a member of any hate group, or any online group, or if I
had ever played Doom or Quake. He mentioned some other games,
but I don't remember them. I'm not a gamer, though my boyfriends
have been. I lost it then. I thought I was going to be brave
and defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried. I think
I hated that worse than anything."
FromZBird
in New Jersey:
"Yeah,
I've had some fantasies about taking out some of these jerks
who run the school, have parties, get on teams, are adored by
teachers, have all these friends. Sure. They hate me. Day by
day, it's like they take pieces out of you, like a torture,
one at a time. My school has 1,500 kids. I could never make
a sports team. I have never been to a party. I sit with my friends
at our own corner of the cafeteria. If we tried to join the
other kids, they'd throw up or leave. And by now, I'd rather
die.
Sometimes,
I do feel a lot of real pure rage. And I feel better when I
go online. Sometimes I think the games keep me from shooting
anybody, not the other way around. Cause I can get even there,
and I'm pretty powerful there. But I'd never do it. Something
much deeper was wrong with these kids in Colorado. To shoot
all those people? Make bombs? You have to be sick, and the question
they should be asking isn't what games do they play, but how
come all these high-paid administrators, parents, teachers and
so-called professional people, how come none of them noticed
how wacked they were? I mean, in the news it said they had guns
all over their houses! They were planning this for a year. Maybe
the reporters ought to ask how come nobody noticed this, instead
of writing all these stupid stories about video games?"
From ES
in New York:
High school
favors people with a certain look and attitude - the adolescent
equivalent of Aryans. They are the chosen ones, and they want
to get rid of anyone who doesn't look and think the way they
do. One of the things which makes this so infuriating is that
the system favors shallow people. Anyone who took the time to
think about things would realize that things like the prom,
school spirit and who won the football game are utterly insignificant
in the larger scheme of things.
So anyone
with depth of thought is almost automatically excluded from
the main high school social structure. It's like some horribly
twisted form of Social Darwinism.
I would
never, ever do anything at all like what was done in Colorado.
I can't understand how anyone could. But I do understand the
hatred of high school life which, I guess, prompted it.
From Dan
in Boise, Idaho:
"Be careful!
I wrote an article for my school paper. The advisor suggested
we write about ?our feelings? About Colorado. My feelings -what
I wrote -- were that society is blaming the wrong things. You
can't blame screwed-up kids or the Net. These people don't know
what they were talking about. How bout blaming a system that
takes smart or weird kids and drives them crazy? How about understanding
why these kids did what they did, cause in some crazy way, I
feel something for them. For their victims, too, but for them.
I thought it was a different point-of-view, but important. I
was making a point. I mean, I'm not going to the prom.
You know
what? The article was killed, and I got sent home with a letter
to my parents. It wasn't in official suspension, but I can't
go back until Tuesday. And it was made pretty clear to me that
if I made any noise about it, it would be a suspension or worse.
So this is how they are trying to blaming a sub-culture and
not thinking about their own roles, about how fucked-up school
is. Now, I think the whole thing was a set-up, cause a couple
of other kids are being questioned too, about what they wrote.
They pretend to want to have a 'dialogue' but kids should be
warned that what they really want to know is who's dangerous
to them."
From a
Slashdot reader:
"Your column
Friday was okay, but you and a lot of the Slashdot readers don't
get it. You don't have the guts to stand up and say these games
are not only not evil, they are great. They are good. They are
challenging and stimulating. They help millions of kids who
have nowhere else to go, because the whole world is set up to
take care of different kinds of kids, kids who fit in, who do
what they're told, who are popular. I've made more friends online
on Gamespot.com than I have in three years of high school. I
think about my characters and my competitions and battles all
day.
Nothing
I've been taught in school interests me as much. And believe
me, the gamers who (try to) kill me online all day are a lot
closer to me than the kids I go to high school with. I'm in
my own world, for sure, but it's my choice and it's a world
I love. Without it, I wouldn't have one... Last week, my father
told me he had cancelled my ISP because he had asked me not
to game so much and I still was. And when he saw the Colorado
thing online, he said, he told my Mom that he felt one of these
kids could be me'I am a resourceful geek, and I was back online
before he got to bed that night. But I have to go underground
now.
My guidance
counselor, who wouldn't know a computer game from Playboy Bunny
poster, told me was Dad was being a good parent, and here was
a chance for me to re-invent myself, be more popular, to ?mainstream.?
This whole Colorado thing, it's given them an excuse to do more
of what started this trouble in the first place - to make individuals
and different people feel like even bigger freaks."
From Jip
in New England:
"Dear Mr.
Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away today, because
of what they saw on television. They told me they just couldn't
be around enough to make sure that I'm doing the right things
on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told me they didn't want to
be standing at my funeral some day because of things I was doing
that they didn't know about. I am at my best friend's house,
and am pretty bummed, because things are boring now. I hope
I'll get it back." return
Appendix
Three
The
Littleton Massacre
Text taken
from http://hsunderground.com
The recent
massacre in Littleton, Colorado has brought into the public
eye the troubles that disaffected high school students face,
and the serious disaster that can take place when outcast students
are not provided with a means to legally and responsibly express
their frustration.
Many pundits
and policymakers have spoken at length about what they would
like to do to prevent a similar massacre again in the future.
None of it, however, has treated the cause -- they all have
been treating the symptoms.
Banning
trenchcoats in Denver schools will not turn disaffected outcast
rebellious teenagers into straight productive members of society.
Having been driven underground the disaffected classes are more
likely to explode in a destructive manner such as the Littleton
massacre.
Banning
bizarre behavior also does not solve any problems. As with banning
trenchcoats, restricting free expression only serves to repress
the students urges to exress themselves. These urges can then
explode into destructive behavior.
Passing
more regulations on firearms will not prevent another massacre.
The gunmen violated nineteen federal laws. No additional laws
will prevent a massacre such as this. Liberalized concealed
carry laws would probably help mitigate a disaster.
The gunmen
in the Littleton massacre were outcast students who did not
have any productive means to express their opinions. They were
poked fun at and did not have enough of a feeling of self-worth
in order to handle the abuse without becoming violent.
In order
to prevent future massacres of this kind, students must be given
outlets to express themselves in non-violent ways. Students
such as the Littleton gunmen will not be satisfied with conventional
mainstream mode of expression such as writing for the school
newspaper or joining student council, because they hold non-mainstream
beliefs.
When I
was in high school I was often persecuted for my beliefs. Luckily,
I came from a background which taught me to respect myself and
I did not buckle under the pressure of the persecution. Rather
than buckling, I spoke out and published a newsletter within
my high school in order to educate, inform, and most of all,
satisfy my need to be heard and make a mark. I acted completely
legally, although I did make a few mistakes along the way which
I regret.
Other students
in different situations will have different ways to solve these
problems within their own communities. I have decided to found
this High School Underground site in order to help inspire students
around the country to use their frustrated energies and start
doing something with them -- in particular, publishing underground
publications within their local high school community. return
Appendix Four
URLS for websites that offer goth responses to the shootings or offer an explanation of the goth ubculture.
http://www.cedep.net/~kryptik/definegoth.html
http://www.blarg.net/~icprncs/gothu.html
http://www.gothic.net/~mayfair/trenchcoat
http://lexicon.psy.tufts.edu/gothic/primer.html
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/6678/gothpage.htm
http://www.gothic.net/benefit
http://www.gothic.net/~mayfair/trenchcoat
http://www.gothic.net/%7Emage/goth/scouts/state
return