6.6 Evidence Flashcards
The impact of media on behaviour
Columbine school Shooting
Dave Cullen
hyperreality
In the USA two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot dead 12 of their fellow students at Columbine school in 1999. Their actions were subsequently explained in some parts of the media as a consequence of playing ‘violent video games’, Doom, in particular.
They confessed that they enjoyed violent videogames and movies but there is no evidence any of that played a role.
I hear from the TCC constantly, because this book made me enemy #1 – for portraying Eric and Dylan as ruthless killers, who murdered other kids for their own petty agendas. The TCC have migrated over time from blogs and online forums to YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, and smaller apps. They’re highly active on Instagram and Twitter today. (I encounter them only on the apps I use.) I’ve watched the groupies multiply, as fresh crops of teens join their ranks each season. Initially, most were just interested in criminology, or they were amateur sleuths fascinated by the criminal mind. Many still are. But within a few years, vast numbers of new arrivals were unabashedly calling themselves fans. They use the killers’ faces as icons, extol their virtues, and compose love poems, fan fiction, and gory memes. Many twist the story to cast the murderers as victims, while the dead, wounded, and traumatised become villains.
In 2012, a kid left a jarring comment on a random YouTube video I’d posted about my new apartment: “Hello mr. cullen, Um I have a question on columbine. Now i recently got expelled from school for writing that i was going to killl every one.” While I waited to hear from the FBI, I decided to see if I could clarify his threat level. “That sounds like a rough situation,” I replied. “Why did you say that? Did you mean it?”
He said he was a fourteen-year-old boy with autism and ADHD, who recently got expelled from his middle school on Long Island. “I wrote that i was going to shoot every one in school and i also wrote that i was going to Slit this girls throat if she talked to me,” he wrote. “I know it was stupid but i get so angry because i get lonley, And annoyed at people for leaving me alone. But i dont get bullied. Its just i fell left out.”
So many versions of reality there. His principal and the local cops added another: they told me he was a troubled kid with a rough home life and extreme boundary issues – but a great heart. He was desperate for affection and had no clue how to express it.
Here’s the twist: many of the TCC don’t really mean it. I mostly block them now, but I’ve chatted online with hundreds over the past few decades, some at great length. Most describe themselves as awkward outcasts, desperate to fit in somehow — and the fandom feels cool. It’s heartbreaking to hear these kids describe the pain they endure at school every day and the affinity they feel for “Dylan” and “Eric”, the fictional characters they’ve constructed.
When I’ve engaged deeply with TCC kids, the word they nearly always use is cool. “I was just trying to look cool.” I get that, I say – but had they realised that most of the other TCC were just posing too? Never. They believe the others really are badass; it’s only them putting up a front. The typical TCC bravado seems comically obvious to me now, but it probably wouldn’t have been at sixteen. Was it obvious to Adam Lanza? He died in his attack, so we’ll never know. We do know that right now, a distraught and lonely kid is contemplating an attack, and this vibrant community insists it condones Columbine and its progeny. It glorifies its selfish inclinations as noble and heroic.
Eric and Dylan came to miserable ends under ghastly conditions after every attempt to salvage their mission had failed. But their fans, oblivious to the full story, regard them as champions.
The Columbine effect has gone global. It has inspired mass shootings in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia – and knife and axe attacks in places as remote as Siberia.
uk murder
In the UK, the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 by two 10-year-old boys was attributed by some media reporting to a violent horror film called Child’s Play 3 rented by the father of one of the boys and which it was assumed they had watched. There was no evidence they had actually seen it.
Television Violence and the Adolescent Boy
Belson
Belson’s study was based upon in-depth interviews with 1565 teenage boys in London. Boys with high television exposure were compared to those with low exposure. Belson drew the conclusion that those boys who had seen a lot of television had committed 49% more acts of violence than those with low exposure. However, Belson’s work has been criticised for failing to distinguish adequately between high exposure to television in general and high exposure to violent television programmes in particular.
Howitt (1992) also pointed out that Belson’s results actually show that there are three types of viewer: those with light, moderate and high exposure to television. Of these, it was actually those with a moderate level of exposure to violent television programmes who were more likely to commit violent acts. It appears, therefore, that Belson’s work can be interpreted in several different ways.
This is a good example of both the methodological difficulties
in studying the influence of the media and the difficulty of making direct links between TV violence and social behaviour.
