By Donald M. Taylor
The headlines are becoming all too familiar: a young man enters his high school dressed in clothes that serve to make a social statement and all too often allow for the concealment of weapons, and then proceeds to kill fellow students at point blank. Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Springfield, Oregon; Thornton, Alberta; and Montreal, Quebec; have all become famous for the wrong reason. What the families, and indeed the entire communities, have faced confronting their own shock and grief cannot be repaid, and much has been lost when because of media attention, their towns are renown. Like many others, I have been bewildered about what these towns have experienced. In particular I puzzle over two issues: first, the violent nature of the acts perpetrated by young men, who, on the surface at least, appear to be relatively normal, living in communities not known for their history of violence. Second, the avalanche of media attention that extends beyond reason in terms of depth and breadth of coverage.
Let me begin with what seems to be the popular theme in terms of the role of media violence, and then change the focus of the argument to what I see as a potentially bigger problem. The argument is that there is too much violence on television, in cartoons, regular programs, and the news. Young people who are at all at risk are prone to act out in an extremely violent manner, and the television shows or media coverage of the violent particulars in a news story, prompts other young people at risk to copy, often in frightening detail, the atrocity depicted in a show or on the news.
The argument begins with violence on television and it is here that I would like to veer in a new direction. The debate among social scientists about the direct impact of media violence on behaviour continues uninterrupted. It is clear that the impact is not universal and overwhelming, but rather subtle and complicated.
Personally, I have no doubt that there are in any large population a few individuals who are deranged enough to be stimulated to copy an atrocity they see on television. Proportionally, there are not many such individuals, and I do not believe any form of censorship will dispel such individuals. They are a psychological time bomb ready to explode.
Of greater concern to me is the impact that violent television has on all of us. In a subtle way it has the effect of gradually changing our collective definition of normal. People develop social rules about appropriate behaviour, and these are the social norms that provide us with a framework for our behaviour. As the label "norm" suggests, social rules define what is "normal." The rules, or norms, may be as simple and mundane as how we greet an acquaintance to what constitutes appropriate dress at one’s place of work or school. These socially defined rules remain in tact as long as the majority is committed to them, and as long as there are social sanctions for violations. When we violate a simple dress code or greeting ritual we are bound to be stared at, ridiculed, or worse ostracized.
Social norms extend beyond the mundane to important areas of our lives. Two of the more important are socially defined rules for sexual behaviour at different age levels, and for the present essay, appropriate behaviour in the face of interpersonal conflict or personal frustration. If the social rule is that "one simply does not swear at an adult or colleague in public," then anyone who does will be sanctioned formally or informally. The worst case scenario involves, for example, a young person who swears at another in school, and instead of being sanctioned, he or she is admired by a certain subset of students.
Notice that even in the worst case scenario, the consequences are minor. But what would happen if instead of swearing some students instigated a fistfight every time they became frustrated. Naturally, the fighting would be sanctioned as a violation of the social rule or norms. But meantime everyone else would now feel it is OK to swear. Their logic would be "well at least I’m not fighting." So now swearing has become socially acceptable by default, and before long becomes the new social norm, or what is "normal."
This is precisely my problem with television violence, in general, and the stories we have witnessed in the news about student massacres, in particular. Before long individual students are thinking, I may fight, be disrespectful, defy authority, not be responsible, but hey, at least I’m not killing anyone.” Similarly schools begin to think “we’re OK even if there is an atmosphere of total disrespect, at least there have been no shootings.” My point is that these dramatic events impact us all by subtly changing the social rules—they are raising the bar of normalcy. The end result is a more hostile school, workplace, and community. And all the while we wonder why? Those of us over thirty think back to when we were students and remember that even swearing in public had consequences whereas today the bar of normalcy has been raised so high that heaping verbal abuse on a teacher or fellow student is treated as a minor misdemeanor. And with every new media atrocity the bar of normalcy is raised ever higher.
This theme of socially defined rules for behaviour and how they are altered by atrocities has a new catalyst, the Internet. I have argued that social rules define what is normal. A student, for example, who behaves differently from the norm will be sanctioned. That is, other students will use ridicule or verbal attacks or ostracization to sanction a student who violates social rules. The student who dresses too nerdy will soon hear about it, and a young woman who is too sexually liberated, or equally, too sexually conservative, will have other women reminding them very quickly about their inappropriate attitudes and behaviour.
In the case of student massacres we are usually presented in the media a profile of a student who is reserved, antisocial, and prone to remarks that suggest extremism. Such a student will receive plenty of messages from fellow students that their attitude and behaviour is not normal, indeed the fact that a student might have so few friends is a clear message that social rules are being violated.
The clear message from all the students is—hey you aren’t normal. The implicit message is that in order to be accepted you have to follow the social rules. Unfortunately, it is easy for our rejected student to bypass these pressures to conform to the social rules. Our reclusive student only has to surf the net until he or she finds a “chat room” where they won’t be sanctioned, but actually rewarded for their antisocial ideas. If a student says they want to kill a teacher at school, the other students will react in horror—a clear message that such a threat if meant seriously, is in complete violation of social acceptability, in short is beyond the bounds of normalcy.
But our student can quickly find like-minds on the Internet to not only acknowledge, but also actually support his or her extremist views. Now our student firmly believes that his or her views are the norm. Clear thinking students will have nothing to do with our student, and thus our student does not get the clear message that his or her extremist views are antinormative. Meanwhile fellow extremists on the Internet, through their support, soon convince our student that his or her views are normal.
Finding such like-minded extremists on the Internet is not difficult. My friend Steve Wright, who has done the most to educate me about these possibilities, recounts his experience sitting with his three-year-old daughter at the computer in search of pictures of tigers on the Internet. A couple of clicks and an array of tiger possibilities were offered, including one that was a pornographic presentation by the "Tiger" lady. As Steve says, a couple of clicks can connect you with any imaginable freak, even when that’s not what you are searching for.
So I am not as worried about copycat atrocities as I am about how young people come to internalize what is normal, the standards against which they understand and judge their own behaviour. These standards are to be found on today’s most potent sources of information, the television set and the Internet. The bar of normalcy keeps rising, not just for those few who may be deranged, but for all of us.
Media Obsession
The fact that the media obsesses over stories involving a killing spree is no surprise, it’s what sells newspapers and increases television ratings. But in each case the coverage goes beyond morbid curiosity. Interestingly, while the coverage begins with bloodthirsty details and intrusions on victim’s families, it quickly extends to a fevered attempt to explain the actions of the perpetrator. And herein lies the key to the media’s obsession.
We all stumble through life with some understanding of how the world around us works, or at least we think we do. We can predict how our parents will respond to our behaviour, how we are likely to do in today’s exam, and whether or not we can afford that new CD, simply because through experience we have come to understand that disrespectful behaviour, not taking the time to study, and a maxed out credit card are what cause our current predicament. It is our understanding of the world we live in that allows us to act on it effectively. That is why we all have a desperate need to believe that we understand the world around us.
Now, let’s add a potent caveat to this need we all have to comprehend the world around us, and that is our need to comprehend the world in such a way that we protect our ego. The minute something negative befalls an acquaintance we immediately seek not only to understand what happened, but also to understand it in such a way that our self is not threatened. When an acquaintance becomes seriously ill, people will be heard to comment "no wonder, he never exercised", or "he never watched what he ate", or "he should have gone for regular check-ups". Translation: Now I understand why he became ill, and the same fate will never befall me because I do exercise, pretend I watch what I eat, and do get a check-up once in a while.
Take the dramatic case of attempting to understand an acquaintance who has committed suicide. Is there any more challenging event in terms of our need to understand? The usual pattern is for people to seek out telltale signs that "should have been a warning." Everyone looks for indications of depression, despondency, and hopelessness. This is coupled with a frantic search for some dramatic life event such as the breakup of a relationship or loss of job. And all of this is designed to allow people to say, first, that the suicide makes "sense", that they understand it, and second that it was prompted by events or moods that do not apply to me.
It is precisely when people cannot find the "tell-tale" signs that a suicide becomes devastating for those who are left behind. Each must confront two realities by their failure to understand the event. First, they must acknowledge that there is no guarantee that they themselves might not succumb to a similar desperate act. Second, they must confront the prospect that they really did not genuinely know their acquaintance, and by extension perhaps they don’t know anyone, even those with whom they are the closest. What could be more threatening than to be confronted with the prospect that you really don’t know the people closest to you, and they likewise don’t really know you.
This is what compels the media to exceed the normal timeframe in terms of covering these stories, and to focus on understanding the perpetrator. It is fuelled by our need first, to understand the perpetrator’s absolutely bizarre behaviour, and second, to understand it in such a way that we can distance our self, our children, and our school, from the perpetrator. The task is made easy when the young perpetrator has an easily identifiable characteristic that sets him apart: an absolutely horrific upbringing, a history of blatant violence, or well-defined mental disorder. Then we can say it will never happen to me. But what if, as in so many of the cases, the distancing characteristics are not so clear? News reporters are themselves obviously surprised at the apparent normalcy of the perpetrators, and that is what motivates them to dig further and deeper. Reporters are spurred on by consumers who are desperate to find the defining and distancing cause. Eventually it comes to light that the perpetrator might have been a bit of a loner, or prone to make verbal threats in a form that appeared harmless at the time they were made. As slight as these behaviours might be on a scale of deviance, we the consumers are quick to magnify these so that we can now have an understanding of the horrific deed.