Content & Context

By Nathan Bierma

Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

March 2003

This Week:

Filter
Places & Culture
Technology & Culture
Scrapbook: college application essays
Weekly Digest

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.

I'm calling this media criticism category "Filter" as a reminder that we do not, as we often subconsciously assume, experience reality through media. We experience a distorted version of reality—a reality that has been filtered through a producer's decisions, a writer's keyboard, a photographer's lens. In the commercial media, these filtering decisions are made for the sake of profit, not necessarily for truth. Our own searches for truth cannot go far without examining the vehicles by which truth is conveyed to us in a multimedia age.

Related:
• More about George Gerbner's cultivation hypothesis here and here
• Media & Culture entries at my NBierma.com Notebook

Skip to Scrapbook / Skip to Digest

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

NAIROBI NATIONAL PARK, Kenya—All across Africa, the tour guides and park rangers guiding foreigners on safari have a little secret: The wild animals are just as exotic to many of them as the are to the tourists. Foreigners may imagine that Africans grow up outrunning lions, monitoring the roar of elephants or gazing at giraffes loping past their homes. But many Africans, if not most, have never been face to face with the animals that tourists come to see. Africa's population of wild animals has steadily declined in recent decades, and those that remain are increasingly confined to preserves. A vast majority of the visitors to those pricey parks are not Africans. The widespread lack of knowledge about the wildlife alarms conservationists, who say the animals' preservation depends on the next generation of Africans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/10/international/africa/10NAIR.html*

LEXINGTON, Ky., Feb. 26—The tobacco patches that cover the hilltops near here are dusted with snow, their sheds locked up till the spring thaw. But what is occupying farmers and politicians across Kentucky, the Carolinas and the rest of tobacco country seems as improbable as a blizzard in August. Governors, lawmakers and even chambers of commerce are calling for increases in cigarette taxes—not only to close gaping state budget deficits, but also to help prevent smoking. In state capitols and county courthouses, bans on smoking that were unthinkable a year or two ago are being enacted every few days. In short, a seismic political shift that was a decade in the making is toppling old alliances and redrawing the landscape of tobacco country.
http://nytimes.com/2003/03/04/national/04TOBA.html*

TECHNOLOGY & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

By some measures, South Korea is the most wired country in the world, with broadband connections in nearly 70 percent of households. In the last year, as the elections were approaching, more and more people were getting their information and political analysis from spunky news services on the Internet instead of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers. Most influential by far has been a feisty three-year-old startup with the unusual name of OhmyNews. … The online newspaper, which began with only four employees, started as a glimmer in the eye of Oh Yeon Ho, now 38, a lifelong journalistic rabble rouser who wrote for underground progressive magazines during the long years of dictatorship here. … Mr. Oh went away to school in the United States, earning a master's degree at the conservative, explicitly Christian Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., whose president is the evangelist pastor Pat Robertson.
http://nytimes.com/2003/03/06/international/asia/06SEOU.html*

OVER the years, Eileen Mullin has given her money to Habitat for Humanity and her time to an animal shelter and the Salvation Army. But last month Ms. Mullin, a computer instructor in Rego Park, Queens, tried a new form of charity: she sent $20 to Kimberly Smith, a mother of five in Watauga, Tex., whom she had never met. Through her Web site, savekimberly.com, Ms. Smith solicits donations toward a down payment on a house. … Ever since Karyn Bosnak, a television producer with an unquenchable desire for fancy footwear, started a Web site last June to solicit donations to pay off her credit card debt, such "e-panhandling" sites have grown like compounded interest on a Visa balance. … Contributions are usually sent through eBay's PayPal service, other electronic payment methods or regular mail. In addition to their life stories, cyber-beggars often publish updates on their funds' progress as well as personal diaries.
http://nytimes.com/2003/02/13/technology/circuits/13begg.html*

Spam is not just a nuisance. It absorbs bandwidth and overwhelms Internet service providers. Corporate tech staffs labor to deploy filtering technology to protect their networks. The cost is now widely estimated (though all such estimates are largely guesswork) at billions of dollars a year. The social costs are immeasurable: people fear participating in the collective life of the Internet, they withdraw or they learn to conceal their e-mail addresses, identifying themselves as user@domain.invalid or someone@nospam.com. The signal-to-noise ratio nears zero, and trust is destroyed. ''Spam has become the organized crime of the Internet,'' said Barry Shein, president of the World, one of the original Internet service providers.
http://nytimes.com/2003/02/09/magazine/09SPAM.html*

It has taken the St. Louis Public Library 135 years to build its collection of 4.5 million holdings; the Web adds that many new documents every three days. No software can identify a large portion of the pornography on the Web without taking down a great many innocuous or useful sites on the way. … Systems designed to spot pornographic images fare even worse. They can't distinguish a painting of St. Sebastian from a Penthouse centerfold, and routinely block pictures of pigs and tapioca pudding, which have the color and texture of human skin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/weekinreview/09NUNB.html*

• Previous Technology & Culture entries at my NBierma.com Notebook

SCRAPBOOK

These essay questions, asked of this year's undergraduate applicants to the University of Chicago, are deviations from the conventional fare of college applications, and a chance for some introspection on your lunch break. Students were asked to respond to one of the following questions in one or two pages. The questions were selected from hundreds of suggestions solicited by e-mail to students admitted in April 2002.

Essay Option 1
Storytelling is an integral part of the formation of our identities. The stories that our parents and our communities tell us about themselves and the world form our first map of the universe. At some point, we begin to tell our own stories to ourselves and to others. Tell us a story you tell. Your story does not have to be either true or a story you would think to tell anyone but yourself; but the story must be your own, and its telling should have significance to you. Your story should also be significant to a listener who might tell a story about you.

Inspired by Susannah Nadler, a graduate of The Spence School, New York, NY

Essay Option 2
How do you feel about Wednesday?

Inspired by Maximilian Pascual Ortega, a graduate of Maine Township High School South, Park Ridge, IL

Essay Option 3
The Sudanese author Tayeb Salhi wrote, "Turning to left and right, I found I was halfway between north and south. I was unable to continue, unable to return." If he is unable to choose, the character faces the threat of being frozen in place or torn between two states. Describe a halfway point in your life—a moment between your own kind of "north" and "south" Tell us about your choice, your inability to choose, or perhaps your folly in thinking there was ever a choice to be made.

Inspired by Rafi Mattahedeh, a graduate of Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA

Essay Option 4
In his book Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll imagines a fantastic, nonsensical world for Alice after she walks through a misty mirror. Physicist Stephen Hawking has speculated that a black hole, not a looking glass, might someday take us to many parallel universes. Three years ago, The Matrix mixed a bit of science with Carroll's fiction to create Thomas Anderson, a contemporary Alice who discovers that the "real" world is in fact a computer-generated dream. Explore the idea of a parallel world through the eyes of a philosopher, an artist, a theologian, a psychologist, or a scientist, or from any perspective you choose. How would you find this alternate reality? Who or what would take you there (by choice or by accident)? Would you or could you be a different person in each world?

Inspired by Jin Wei Cham, a graduate of Raffles Junior College, Singapore

Essay Option 5
In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, pose an untraditional or uncommon question of your own. The answer to your question should display your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, sensible woman or man, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago. Remember, this is about "adventurous inquiry." Be sure that you actually use a question of your own.

DIGEST

For links with an *, you can enter "bcread" for both member name and password

• Every time I hear a politician or pundit rattle off the cliché; "weapons of mass destruction," I think back to this important article last year by Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic. Despite the rhetoric, he says, chemical and biological weapons have never caused mass destruction. Historically, terrorist use of chemical and biological agents has been ineffectual and a weak alternative to bombs. They succeed in spreading a unique brand of terror, as this letter writer points out, but not in causing massive casualties. Not that we should naively no longer fear such agents, or assume that they will never be massively destructive. But we should clarify this point a currently confusing debate: we are worried about the annihilative potential of nuclear weapons; chemical and biological weapons, scary as they are, are not "weapons of mass destruction."
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021007&s=easterbrook100702&c=1*

Related:
Just war? Jimmy Carter vs. John McCain on Iraq, in the New York Times.*
NYT's Thomas Friedman: Regime change, yes, but maybe not now*

• In retrospect, we can see the attacks of September 11 coming down the pike. They were just the last in a series of dots the FBI and CIA failed to connect. Score another one for hindsight bias—or, as psychologist Baruch Fischhoff termed it in his famous study, "creeping determinism." As Fischhoff found, it's a natural psychological error to overestimate the probability of an event after it happens. In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, deconstructs the faulty thinking of the new book The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot and wonders what it means for intelligence reform in the United States.
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/030310crat_atlarge

• On the morning of June 30, 1908, a deafening explosion lit the sky a couple miles over central Siberia, flattening huts and knocking people unconscious for miles around. We still don't know what it was, says the Chicago Reader. Unfortunately, historical discussion of the incident has been seized by the UFO crowd as an attack by alien life forms (and, sure enough, the incident showed up in an X-Files episode). More likely, the Reader says, the Tungus Event was one of the planet's most spectacular recent encounters with an asteroid.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030228.html

Related:
New evidence of 50-year-old explosion on the moon, from the New York Times.

• When are secret government conspiracies a matter of federal policy? When it comes to the Witness Protection Program, created by Gerald Schur in 1967. The program, which has created false identities and new lives for over 20,000 people, offers immunity and anonymity to mobsters and terrorists who would otherwise fear for their lives upon testifying in court. The vast majority never commit a crime again. Listen to an NPR interview with Schur from this past week, or read last year's Salon Q-and-A with him and coauthor Pete Earley upon the publication of WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program.
http://toddshow.org/log/dailylistings/03102003.asp
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2002/02/28/shur

• Part of the horror of anorexia and bulimia is how they trap girls at younger and younger ages. But the next wave of eating disorders may hit women in midlife crises, writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. The midlife transitions of divorce, the death of a parent, or an empty nest can lead women to binge and starve themselves to the point of sickness. Just as pre-pubescent anorexics act out of a fear of adolescence, says one psychologist, older anorexics may fear the coming of menopause.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/fashion/09EAT.html*

• Browsing: LA Times underwhelmed by remake of creepy Willard; Washington Post cuts Village Voice's rock journalism down to size, and more in Emily Nussbaums' Slate roundup of the latest criticism of movies, music and books.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2079972

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

By Nathan Bierma

Content & Context

This Week:

FILTER: VIOLENCE AND WORLDVIEW

PLACES & CULTURE

TECHNOLOGY & CULTURE

SCRAPBOOK

DIGEST

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November/December 2016