Anger Sells

First, a disclaimer about my disposition: I don’t like anger. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but I’m of the opinion that, like any strongly felt emotion, it can cloud people’s judgment. Want to get angry at the Slayer concert? Knock yourself out (literally). But if you’re trying to make some sort of judgment about the world around you, I think that being angry can only lead you astray.

And yet, I have to admit, right now, after reading about last night’s mass murder, I feel angry, angry and fatigued, because I know the cycle: violence happens, then people want something to be done about the violence, but that typically involves restricting or monitoring others in some way (restricting gun access, making your mental health history available to authorities, monitoring your web use, censoring (or at least condemning) certain kinds of expression). Then a group of people will become angered by the effort to control or restrict them, citing their right to be free and how it is being infringed. When I think about the seeming inevitability of the cycle, I get tired. I also think, “What can I do about it?”

Maybe my small contribution as a researcher and media educator can be to further understanding of the role of anger in this whole cycle. Being angry at some group of “unfamiliar others” (e.g., not some ex-boss or some ex-girlfriend who pissed you off) seems like a necessary-but-not-sufficient criterion for committing mass murder. The violent acts seem to grow from expressions of anger and hatred, and they seem to inspire anger and hatred.

Maybe there’s something about the way media allows us to stay “immersed” in an angry state that perpetuates this cycle. We all get angry from time to time, sometimes at individuals, but other times at groups of people we don’t know personally (Republicans, Democrats, politicians in general, liberal media, Fox News, Comcast, etc.). How much time do you spend in that angry state, and does exposure to certain media messages keep you in that angry state? My guess is that in order to engage in an act of mass violence, you need to have been in a prolonged state of anger against unfamiliar others, and that media (mainstream media messages and interpersonal content via online communities) likely plays some role in helping to sustain that anger. In this respect, I suspect it is different than violence against people you know, which might be prompted by one incident and happen in the heat of the moment.

But here’s why it’s hard to just say that expressions of anger are uniformly bad. Sometimes, you have anger at an injustice, and the anger seems to be what motivates people to take action. Without the emotional “fire” of anger, people might not take action, and injustice would be allowed to persist. But, of course, that concept of “injustice” is subjective: the people perpetrating the initial act of aggression often see themselves as bringing justice to the world. So, too, do the angry people who respond.

Maybe it’s what you do when you get angry – some people act aggressively while others take political action. While it is obvious that those who respond to mass violence do not (thank god) respond with acts of aggression that are of the same degree, I can see the responses as acts of aggression (albeit on the less harmful end of the continuum). Often, people don’t respond to acts of mass violence by being motivated to vote, which is in many ways a slow, complex process involving numerous compromises and, as such, not exactly anger-sating. They are often verbally aggressive toward others that they feel are somehow part of the “other side”. I see protests as somewhere in the middle: sometimes, they are acts of political and civic action; other times, they are not much different than coordinated verbal aggression directed at an ideological “other”.

Moreover, any attempt to say “don’t be angry” or “don’t expose yourself to anger-inducing media” to anyone will likely meet with the response: “you’re just trying to pacify and distract us from the injustice!” Who am I to say that anyone else shouldn’t be pissed off at the state of the world, or should avoid news that makes them angry and watch more cat videos instead (or this damn dog getting licked by cows, which is pretty cute), or at least maintain some balance between the two?

But still, I do want to talk to people about how anger in media, at least potentially, at least sometimes, only appears to be about rectifying injustice and improving the world, when in actuality, it is just a kind of emotional button-pushing, just working on a vulnerability in our brains, this ancient instinct to be tribal, to find a threat, to identify some Other as the source of evil or injustice. I cannot tell anyone what kinds of messages are button-pushing and what kinds will help motivate people to take action that will make the world a better place. To do so would be imposing my concept of “justice” on them, and I just don’t think people dig that.

But maybe they’d be receptive to this message: If you’re in the business of producing or circulating media content, you’ll never go broke overestimating consumers’ appetite for content that appeals to their sense of righteous anger. Put simply: anger sells. And we all like to think it’s not the media we consume, but that it’s the media the other guy consumes. So, take a step back. Take a good, long, hard look at the media content that you consume that you know makes you angry. Be open to the possibility that the messages you choose might just be, at least in part, button-pushing. Even if it (and you) is/are on the right side of justice, maybe there’s some part of it that just ends up keeping you angry and keeps you pushing the buttons for more. Keep asking, “what can I do to make the world a better place?” And if the answer is “shoot someone”, think a little harder.    

Are School Shootings Becoming the New Norm?

It's a familiar story: a string of low-probability/high-consequence events capture the front pages and they become the subject of public discourse, including plenty of editorials. Once it was airplane hijackings or serial killings. Now, it's school shootings. We need to do something to stop this trend of horrible events. In most cases, it's beyond debate whether or not the events are horrible. But are they indicative of trends (i.e., an increase over the prior frequency level of similar horrible events)?

Recently, a statistic has been making the rounds on blogs, social media, and in the mainstream news: 74 school shootings have occurred since the shootings at Sandy Hook in late 2012. The statistic comes from a group that has a rather explicit agenda: Everytown for Gun Safety. While it does give us some information about an important social phenomenon, my initial feeling about this statistic is that when taken out of context (and it is almost always shown without any context), it is apt to mislead.

First, there's the question of how we define "similar events". Do we count incidents in which guns were discharged but didn't kill anyone, or injure anyone? Do we count homicides related to drug deals? Do we count suicides? Do we count accidental gun discharges? Do we count colleges as well as elementary and secondary schools? In the case of the above statistic, Everytown for Gun Safety has counted all of these as "school shootings".

Why does it matter how inclusive our definition of "school shootings" is? Aren't all of these shootings horrible events that we should seek to avoid? In my opinion, yes, absolutely. However, if we're trying to understand a certain social phenomenon and whether a string of recent events are part of a trend, broad definitions only muddy the water. The social and psychological processes involved in suicide-by-gun at or near schools is likely to be different in important ways than those processes as they are applied to individuals like Adam Lanza and Elliot Rodger. Obviously the common denominators are "school" and "gun", and if you're of the mind that gun control is the ONLY solution to the problem of any kind of school shooting, then you may not care about the differences. But you should. Even if you're in favor of gun control and you think it will cut down on the number of people who die each year in school shootings, it won't help to ignore other factors, and I think overly-broad definitions of "school shootings" encourage this kind of ignorance. Is the increase in school shootings due to an increase in angry-young-males lashing out at the world, an increase in drug/gang-related shootings, or both? In order to address the issue, it's important to know.

Is it really a trend? If you just tell someone how many incidents occurred in one year, that doesn't really give them a good idea of whether or not it is part of a potentially alarming trend. This is the real reason I'm writing about this. I was genuinely curious. I wanted to know if the headlines were part of a familiar kind of hysteria about a random rash of low-probability/high-consequence events or if they're on to something. It wasn't easy to tell just by reading the news or the blogs. But there IS data on this. It ain't perfect data, but I think it may help me get an answer, this is one of the things I absolutely love about today's Internet - you have access to data and can see for yourself whether there is evidence to support a conclusion.

I used this list from Wikipedia of school shootings in the U.S., defined as "incidents in which a firearm was discharged at a school infrastructure, including incidents of shootings on a school bus." It included K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities, so the definition is pretty similar to that used by Everytown for Gun Safety. The list draws from newspaper archives. By virtue of their newsworthiness, school shootings seem unlikely to have ever gone unreported, so I think we can safely assume that this list is a fairly accurate record of school shootings and doesn't contain much in the way of systematic measurement error. 

Before I show you what I found, take a moment to guess: how many school shootings do you think there were in 1880? How about 1904? 1970?

(scroll down for the answers!)














Here's what I found:

So yeah, it does seem like there's something crazy going on in the last 18 months if you define school shooting this way. Why do I designate the last 18 months as the time period to pay attention to? It's about the time that the Adam Lanza killings occurred, and it's also near the beginning of the year, but these aren't good reasons to use this date as a cut-off. But if you look at the number of shootings per month, they really seem to go up in January of 2013.

There is plenty of seemingly random year-to-year variation across the whole 164 year period, but the number of incidents tend to fluctuate between 0 and 5 per year. It's worth noting that the last year there were no school shootings was 1981, so you could use that as a the beginning of the trend if you really wanted to.

It was weird for me to read about children shooting themselves in the early 1900's at school. It doesn't fit with my conception of the culture at the time. So school shootings aren't unprecedented, but after looking at this data, it seems hard to deny that the problem has gotten much worse in the past few years (or possibly since 1995 or 2005). If there were, say, 10 school shootings in 2013, I think you could possibly say that it was due to random variation. But there have been 31 in the first half of 2014!

What if we dig a bit deeper and look at the circumstances around each shooting. Do we see differences between the shootings from, say, the early 1900's and the shootings of today? In my search through the shootings since the 1850's in schools, I tried to isolate ones that I thought were similar to Sandy Hook: not suicide; not accidental; and not directed at one particular individual for reasons of, say, revenge or a rejection; not gang-related. I call this kind of shooting "mass school shootings". I include cases in which an individual clearly attempted a mass school shooting but was thwarted (though there are only a few of these, so they don't make much of a difference). Again, I must emphasize: I'm not saying that those other kinds of shootings aren't problems that need to be solved, but only that I want to isolate Sandy-Hook-ish shootings to see if there is indeed a trend. Here's what I found:

Note that the Y axis is different than the Y axis in the first graph. If I had used the same Y axis in both graphs (or included both lines in the same graph), it would've been hard to see the mass shootings line, so this is why I used two different y axes.

If you look at most of the school shootings pre-1966, they're directed at a particular individual and the motives are typically revenge (for a bad grade or being rebuffed by a would-be lover). Again, it was weird to read about mass school shootings similar to Sandy Hook that took place in the 1800's (though there were just two, so it really was anomalous).

As you can see, there's a similar pattern to the pattern in the overall school shootings: not much happens until recently. But what do we mean by "recently"? You could easily put the starting point of the trend at 1985, the first year there were more than two separate incidents of mass school shootings. What about since Sandy Hook? Let's take a closer look at the data, starting at 1985:

So, 1985 was a bad year, and so were 1988, 1998 (the 90's in general were pretty bad for this type of thing) and 2006. 2013 (the only post-Sandy-Hook year in our data set) is bad, but not much worse than these other years. In the first half of 2014, there have been three mass school shootings, but it would be dangerous to extrapolate from that and estimate that there will be six for the year. Extrapolation with such small sample sizes rarely maps on to reality.

In the end, here's what I get from this little exercise. The truth, such as I can determine it from available evidence, is that school shootings in general have become a lot more common in the last 18 months, but it seems unwarranted to say that Sandy-Hook-style mass school shootings have become a lot more common in that same time period. If you wanted to identify a starting point for the cultural phenomenon of mass school shootings, you'd be better off going back to 1985. If I'm looking for a culprit or cause of this phenomenon, I wouldn't look at things that are going on right now in our culture and in our laws. I would look at things that have been around and haven't changed much since 1985.

As would be the case with any phenomenon, my attitude would change if new evidence warranted such a change. If there were no more school shootings this year, I'd stick to my interpretation: nothing new in the world of mass school shootings since '85. BUT if there were 3 or more, then I'd reconsider my outlook.

From looking at this data, I also get the impression that there is an urgent problem with shootings at schools, but that this problem isn't akin to the problem of Sandy Hook or Columbine. Like any compassionate person, I'm appalled at that rapid increase in school shootings you see in the first graph, and I want to know more about why it's occurring and what we can do to stop it. A lot of these school shootings are committed by sane people who have a deep disagreement with another person and (importantly) access to guns. If anything, I think this analysis makes the case of those who choose to pin the problem of school shootings on a lack of proper mental health care and not on gun availability (I'm looking at you, Wayne LaPierre!) a lot weaker. School shootings are skyrocketing, according to the evidence, and most incidents don't involve mental health issues as such. So, maybe addressing the issues of gun availability, conflict resolution, and, perhaps, a cultural component may be an effective way to lessen the number of overall school shootings.

This analysis does NOT make for an easily conveyed, pithy soundbite. Because they need something pithy, the news and bloggers and others have latched on to a pithy-put-misleading alternative - the "74 since Sandy Hook" stat. On the one hand, this stat may grab more people's attention, gets them to click and gets them to post. On the other hand, based on all the evidence I can see, it IS misleading. It's use opens up those trying to convince others of the severity of the issue to attacks based on their use of misleading statistics.

This is, I would say, a familiar story in the use of statistics related to emotionally-loaded, low-probability/high-consequence events. It's a story that's worth returning to when discussing media literacy.

One final note: in my search for information about this topic, I found this article on CNN that actually DID dig a little deeper and found results similar to my own. They found a few more "Sandy-Hook-like" shootings because their definition differed slightly from mine, and (importantly) they had no historical comparison so they can't really talk about trends, but still, it gave me hope for more context when reporting stats in news. Big ups to CNN (though you really need to stop with the auto-playing videos).

Data source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States#cite_ref-47

Is this a Big Deal? Hysteria, Social Media, and the News

I am watching, listening, and reading (and now writing) about a news story as it unfolds: a gunman has shot himself in the undergrad library of UTexas. The story is especially salient to me because I'm going there for a conference tomorrow, I spent two years there as a Master's student, and I know a fair amount of people who live there, some of which attend the university.

This event (which may be in the past or may still be occurring, depending on whether reports of a second gunman who has yet to be apprehended are true) came to my attention through reddit. I woke up, fixed breakfast, watched a little Sportscenter on ESPN, and then opened my computer to go online. Although I have my browser homepage set to the NYTimes, I rarely start a day by opening a browser but instead click on a bookmarked page from my already-open browser, usually checking my email or going to reddit first out of habit and out of a desire for self-relevant information (email) and appealing, brief distractions (reddit). So if, say, some event of great consequence were to happen, it is likely that I would find out about it this way. But if it were truly of GREAT consequence (e.g. 9/11), I would've found out about it either on NPR (which I flipped on when I was barely awake, as is my habit) or ESPN.

So there was the headline on reddit: Shooter at University of Texas library RIGHT NOW. Rather than click on the link or the comments, I went to NYTimes to corroborate it. Oddly, the story didn't appear to be there. I thought that the shooter maybe didn't kill anyone, or that it was a hoax. But then, buried in smaller headlines on the page, I saw mention of it. I read that story and it said that the gunman fired shots and killed himself, but no mention of anyone else being hurt. I then turned on CNN and, oddly, they weren't talking about it. Neither was Fox News. Other news stations were playing commercials.

I didn't have all the details of this story, but the fact that it wasn't plastered all over the front page of the Times and that CNN wasn't covering it at that moment led me to this conclusion: it is not a big deal. Because of the lack of coverage, it is extremely unlikely that anyone I know was hurt in anyway as a result of this event. It would be safe for me to assume that everything was fine with them, everything was fine with me going there tomorrow, and that everything would, in general, be fine.

This is not the picture that I got when I went to Facebook and twitter. Many people in my online social network have connections to UT, and so many of them posted links to news stories about the shooting, just within the last hour, with very little supplementary information other than brief declarations of fear or concern. With twitter, I had to search for Austin, UT, but the result is the same: brief expressions of fear, rumors of a second shooter still on the loose. From this information, it seemed like a big deal, a huge deal. Reading my Facebook feed, I was...well, not necessarily gripped with fear or concern, but I got the impression that I needed to keep monitoring the situation out of concern for people I knew and to see if I would still be traveling to Austin tomorrow. If I watched mainstream media, I wouldn't get that feeling. I would get the feeling that I could relax and go back to work.

There's this narrative that mainstream media is too big, too ad-supported, to get at the truth. The truth percolates up from the blogosphere, from citizen journalists. If this story isn't covered by CNN or NYTimes right away, its because they're slow moving dinosaurs who just got scooped, and they don't know what's really important but instead promote the values of their sponsors. But here, in terms of "level of appropriate concern," I think that the mainstream media has it right. If I step back and look at the situation, at least what I know of the situation (seems like an isolated, botched shooting, not a coordinated, successful attack by several people), the appropriate reaction is: don't panic, its okay, no one is in more danger than they were a day ago. I just don't get this from the little social network newsfeed that's evolved over the past few years. There have been legitimate criticisms of coverage of disasters like 9/11 and Katrina saying that certain frames used in the coverage gave viewers the impression that there was more panicking and more reason for panicking than there really were. I've had this feeling before about bias in the news, but I think it applies here, too: you thought this was a problem when mainstream interests were handling reporting the news? Just wait until 'the people' start doing the reporting.

I think that in some cases, crowdsourcing news helps information get out faster and that the crowd can, counter to our intuition, promote the accurate, relevant information over the inaccurate information in an efficient manner, more efficiently than MSM. But the emotion that seeps into our facebook feeds, the undiluted fear that cannot help but contaminate our accounts of our experiences and is being mistaken for "news", doesn't move us any closer to gaining an accurate impression of what the true risk is to our selves and people we know and love when a bad thing happens. Its self-relevant and is provided by many different people, and thus appeals to us as "truth," but its laden with emotions that aren't present in detached MSM accounts of events. One may say that those emotions are part of the truth of an event. That sounds good, but I think that emotional reporting of an event as it is happening is likely to be associated with overestimates of how threatening the event is to our selves and others (I'll avoid using the loaded term "hysteria").

One thing that really stuck with me about the coverage of 9/11 was the strangely detached monotone of many of the anchors as we all watched the World Trade Centers collapse. Certainly not the way twitter would've handled it. I feel like this change has happened in the past couple of years and that it is significant: many people no longer turn on the TV when disaster strikes. They go online. Online promises more viewpoints, more immediate updates, deeper and broader accounts of everything. Which is better? Which is truer? Which leads to worry and which leads to action?

What else would you have done?

In reading a shit-ton of media effects articles for several classes, I've come back to some of the same questions about their worth. I should say that I generally subscribe to the idea that most of these studies really do reveal something about what media cause us to think or how they cause us to behave or feel. Just so we're clear, I'm talking about the articles about the effects of violent video games on aggression, or of advertisements with skinny models on reader/viewer's body image. I accept the findings that say that, even when you control for things like pre-existing trait aggression and low self-esteem and latent racism and various attachment styles and SES, the media can have a negative influence on you, even though you might not be aware of it.

The findings imply that if you don't want to be problematically aggressive, bigoted, self-hating, or anorexic, you should avoid exposing yourself to certain media. OK, fine. But what do you then do to satisfy that craving that you would've satisfied with that media, and are we sure that the media in question wasn't providing you with some positive influence that might outweight the negative influence?

This occurred to me while watching a talk on UMich's Channel 22 about the causes of cancer. There were some things, like wine for instance, that caused women's risk of breast cancer to go up a tiny but measurable amount. However, it caused their risk of cardiovascular disease to go down a bit. And wine tastes good and makes you feel good. So, even if we accept that initial bit of information - that wine makes you slightly more likely to get breast cancer - we still may choose to drink wine for other reasons. Similarly, even if you know the risk of getting lung cancer from smoking, you may choose to smoke. You may also watch violent porn even though you know it will make you more likely to be callous towards rape victims.

I think we need to ask what people would have done if they didn't do something that they know is bad for them. It is possible that if a person chose not to smoke those cigarettes, that they might use booze to fill that void, becoming an alcoholic. It is possible that even if they resist all temptation in the form of substance, they may just become more ornery and hard to be around, driving people away which, in turn, makes them more depressed and hostile towards others. It is also possible that, after a rough patch of having to do without those vices, that the person breaks their bad habit and finds things that make them a happier, healthier person.

In order to make a judgment as to whether or not an individual or a group of people should stop doing x (be it smoking cigs, watching violent porn or slasher films, drinking wine, eating bacon, whatever), you have to consider the choice to engage in that vice in the context of that person or those people's lives. That's damn difficult, and when it comes to addicts, we know that they can't be trusted to make that judgment. But to simply say that just because a vice has an established negative effect and expect people to use that information to stop doing whatever it is that they're doing doesn't make sense to me.

I guess what I'm advocating for is a holistic study of why people engage with media that is known to have harmful, anti-social effects. That doesn't mean that you're advocating its use, necessarily. Too often, conversations I've had on tabloids, Jerry Springer, soap operas or other "trash media" turn into arguments between people who think it really fucks w/ people's heads and other people who think that it helps them cope with the troubles of everyday life and its just being attacked b/c it doesn't appeal to the wealthy, white male heterosexual establishment. We get it. Both of those things could be true. Study of the effects of media, and indeed the worth of media, needs to move beyond that petty argument. We need to ask, with open minds, what are the good things and what are the bad things about each bit of media for each different type of person.

Free Thoughts on Violence

I listened to two interviews with the directors of Hostel II and Captivity recently, which made me think a bit more about "torture porn" and the public debate over the effects of violent media. I'd always dismissed extreme horror from afar, but these guys seem pretty intelligent and sensible. Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing about the audience. So, though its a dead-horse subject, I thought I'd wildly speculate about the effects of violent media, just for kicks.

One thing that bugs me about the debate is the exclusive concentration on ratings. This implies that negative effects can only happen to people who are 17 or younger. I'll accept the fact that the younger you are, the more susceptible to media messages you are, but that doesn't mean that everyone over 17 is not influenced by what they see in movies, on TV, and on the internet. My feeling is that kids are deprived of violent and sexual media (or at least it is discouraged by parents) and then when they go away to college, they binge on it. It has the appeal of the forbidden fruit, and they feel as though they have to find out what they've been missing (and there's a natural draw to it, at least for males).

Is it that hard to believe that watching a ton of extremely violent media might make an adult more apt to be violent? Chuck Klosterman had a good point in the terrific doc Metal: A Headbanger's Journey about media effects. He knows that the lyrics to Ozzy Osborne's Suicide Solution is about boozing, but accepts the fact that maybe someone might misinterpret the lyrics and think its primarily about killing yourself. That's all I'm saying here: its not a huge leap to think that someone might not get the subtle subtext of a movie like Hostel II (which, according to Eli Roth, is about young Americans' lamentable lack of worldliness in the post-9/11 world).

Let's say one 22 year old watches Hostel II (fine, Hostel PART II) once, watches about 2 or 3 extremely violent movies and plays 40-50 hours of extremely violent videogames every year, while another 22 year-old watches Hostel II 5 times, watches 20 or 30 extremely violent movies and plays roughly 400 hours of violent videogames per year. If these individuals were 17 or under, we could blame the parents of the second one. But they're not. They're adults, and they can do whatever they want. Does that mean that the second individual cannot be swayed by what he watches and plays? That seems to be the common wisdom, which is complete bullshit (I think).

My understanding of the existing research on media violence is that only those who are prone to violent behavior and/or have behavioral problems are likely to be negatively effected by violent media. So clearly, its less about an individual text and more about the context in which it is seen, the context in the viewer's life. I'd speculate that if a person who is prone to violence could be made to act violently, it wouldn't be by an individual movie or game but through an unvaried "media diet": nothing but torture porn, 1st-person shooters, and Faces of Death. If you had two anti-social 30 year-olds, and one of them watched nothing but torture porn for a year, and the other watched one or two per year and instead just listened to a lot of metal and lifted weights to get out his aggression, it seems possible that the second person might not only be less apt to be violent, but be less apt to be an anti-social person.

That's another thing: I doubt that watching or playing a ton of violent media will make you more apt to torture or kill someone, but it might make you a shittier person in general. It might have the same effects as heavy porn use. Neither is going to make you go rape or kill someone, but you'll be less apt to go out and try to make deep, lasting bonds with people. Like drugs or booze, excessively sexy and/or violent media (or rather excessive use of such media) makes a person happy; its tricks your mind into thinking that you're doing something good by releasing endorphins, when in actuality, you're just fucking with the chemicals in your brain without really changing your life circumstances.

Maybe anti-sociability is the real threat, not Columbine or Virginia Tech-like disasters which, sad as they are, are still extremely uncommon. Consider the following detriments to being anti-social:

• Politically, you're easy to control. By listening to the new Rage Against the Machine album, anti-social adults think they're sticking it to the man, when in fact they're just listening to music. Not that RATM is excessively violent or sexual (certainly not excessively sexual), but only that the adult whose desires are sated by media is less apt to interact with the world at large, less apt to learn about something from someone else or debate a point and more apt to regurgitate whatever the rock star said. Sure, sometimes media can be a catalyst for action, but from what I've seen, its just as often used as a substitute for action.
  

• Economically, you're destined to spend most of your life on a lower rung of the ladder. To achieve success in any line of work, it helps to be able to connect with other people, and if all you can talk about is the Burning Crusade, you're not gonna make it very far, whether you want to start an organic farm or work for Goldman Sachs.
  

• Healthwise, you're more likely to be a burden to the system. In the long run, anti-social people are more apt to be angry and depressed, and angry and depressed people are more apt to require treatment (which funnels R&D $ and time away from cancer research, etc).

If you're going to treat the concept of media effects seriously, I think you've got to get past two ideas: only children are susceptible to media's influence; seeing or playing an individual text once is likely to have a substantial effect. It seems like there's going to be more and more violent and sexual (and sexually violent) media out there, whether we like it or not. Perhaps this will mean that we have to stop thinking about individual texts (because if you ban or regulate one, someone else will just make a similar one to replace it) and start thinking about regulating media diets the way we are starting to regulate tobacco or booze use, for instance. Maybe you could tax the shit out of all sexually violent videos to deter people from using it. You can't just rely on parents to dictate their offspring's media diet for the rest of their lives. At some point, adults will need to realize that media they freely choose could make them as anti-social (and as much of a burden to the system) as an alcoholic.

The industry, academia, and the world at large seems to tacitly accept the fact that a 16 year-old who watches extremely violent and or sexually violent material will be negatively effected by it, but I can't imagine that they would ever be willing to accept the possibility that a 22 or 32 year-old can be negatively effected by violent media as well. 'Sup wit dat?

When thinking about how to regulate violent media, I like to compare the negative social impact of violent media to that of drugs and booze. We've decided that people are too easily fooled into thinking that the pleasure of doing heroin outweighs the negative effects on them and, since they cannot help but be a part of society, on society as a whole. We've also decided that that's not the case with booze, or cigarettes for that matter. Sure, people can drink themselves to death, but its harder to really fuck up your life with booze than w/ heroin, so one is legal (but heavily regulated) and the other isn't. Where does violent media fit in to all this?

I'd say its more like booze, for now. Maybe, you get a few cases of it possibly influencing someone who wouldn't have been as violent as they turned out to be to become more violent, but society is hardly falling apart. But this could change if people inundate unregulated online video sites with homemade torture porn (and if people think that Eli Roth is the problem, they should wait until the internet does to the horror genre what it did to porn - make it more extreme, cheaper, and more accessible). And maybe the measure of how bad things are getting has less to do with how many massacres we have and more to do with how socially, politically, and economically active a violent/sexual media-sated generation turns out to be.