1 of 5
This Week:
FILTER: VIOLENCE AND WORLDVIEW
It was an ominous way to end the serene Saturday afternoon golf telecast I was enjoying. The camera was on a wide shot of a sunny fairway as the announcer signed off by saying, "Tonight on NBC: Law and Order; Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit." And filling the time between the golf and this prime-time orgy of violence and manhunts were the evening newscasts, with their own relentless narrative of murders, rapes, and war.
Even as researchers announced this week an umpteenth study finding that kids who watch violent TV are more aggressive, I remain more interested in a subtler question: does the violence we see on television lead us to perceive the world as a more violent place than it actually is? Only a fringe of the population may be inspired to rape or kill at the sight of such acts on TV, but does media violence affect the rest of us by warping our worldview?
George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and longtime editor of the Journal of Communication, spent a career in media studies asking such questions. He findings are known as the cultivation hypothesis—the theory that the media cultivate a certain kind of worldview based on what they choose to portray. He found some interesting things about how television shapes our perceptions. For example, people who watch a lot of television estimate their chances of being a victim of a violent crime within the next week as 1 in 10; the reality is closer to 1 in 10,000. Similarly, women understandably fear dark streets but overestimate their chances of becoming a victim by a factor of ten, and mistakenly perceive muggers to be a worse threat than injury in a car. Frequent TV viewers assume that 5 percent of the population is involved in law enforcement—as police officers, criminal lawyers, and judges. Light viewers correctly estimate the figure is closer to one percent.
This raises intriguing questions about how media violence shapes our social behavior. For example, does a steady diet of media violence and Law and Order lead us to vote for political candidates with law-and-order rhetoric—candidates who prioritize law enforcement and prisons over education and job training in troubled areas? Does media violence play a role in urban sprawl, driving the fearful affluent farther away from the urban centers of violence they see on TV? Suppose that for one month, TV producers replaced every portrayal of a violent crime with a car accident. People would soon be afraid to get in their cars and drive on the highways, and might take a renewed interest in environmentally friendly mass transit. Does, even, a diet of media violence feed our considerations of the coming war in Iraq, leading us to overestimate the necessity of violent intervention and underestimate the effectiveness of diplomacy?
Perhaps media violence is only a small factor in these social phenomena. But it still, as Gerbner says, cultivates a context for how we see the world and other human beings. In the prime time melodramas like Law and Order, and the ever-multiplying CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise on CBS, the interactions of victims, perpetrators and officers form an artificial narrative. The violence and blood flow are more shocking than illuminating. By contrast, the PBS reality-documentary Domestic Violence, which I reviewed online this week, contains no violence and only one scene showing a bloody victim, but it leads us to form a more meaningful human connection with the people who suffer a hidden horror, and to long for the light of Christ's hope.
share this page
RSS Feed
