Mixed Messages: Children Negotiating 

 Meaning in Media Violence

 

Lee Hood

Center for Mass Media Research

University of Colorado

Campus Box 287

Boulder, CO  80309

Lee.Hood@Colorado.EDU

Presented to the Popular Communication Division,

International Communication Association

May, 1999

 

Please do not quote without permission

 

 

Abstract

                The effect of media violence on children has been a topic of study for most of the 20th century.  Many of these studies have focused on behavior, and the presumed negative effects of violent messages and images.  This study examines instead the meanings children assign as autonomous meaning-makers embedded in popular practices of media reception.  Fiske's (1992) concept of 'cultural competence' suggests audiences bring their knowledge of  media conventions to their interpretation of media texts.  This paper suggests that such knowledge

is used, even by children, in interactions with media violence.  It examines how children differentiate between violent portrayals in popular culture, and the impact of those distinctions on the ways children perceive violent content.  It applies Hall's (1980) notion of encoding/decoding within a tradition of literature asserting children as a lively audience maintaining an interactive relationship with television (e.g., Hodge and Tripp, Palmer, Buckingham).  It examines the contradictions children and parents face between their awareness of the media literacy discourse -- what they should or should not be watching -- and their own experiences with cultural products.  The paper argues that, despite the discourse of media effects, children are finding ways to make their own distinctions in relating to violent content.  

 





                The recent tragedy of Columbine High School in Colorado has refocused attention on a long-debated topic: the effect of media violence on children.  It is a question that was asked even before the age of television, and now encompasses not only the mass media of television and film but also the Internet and even video games.  The Columbine tragedy contains some eerie parallels to the school violence depicted in the feature film The Basketball Diaries, as we are reminded time and again on television programs showing a clip of Leonardo DiCaprio gunning down his classmates.  The killers in the Columbine tragedy also, it is reported, were fascinated with the violent video game Doom, which graphically features protagonists tracking and killing their targets.

                The debate over media violence takes two general approaches: one, an argument that watching violence leads children to become violent, and two, an argument from media producers and distributors that they have a First Amendment right to show whatever they choose and that they are not responsible for what media consumers do with the messages.

                This paper will argue for a third approach: to consider possibilities beyond the behaviorist model that looks only for causal links between stimulus and behavioral outcomes.  The intent here is to focus on the negotiations in meaning-making related to what is commonly considered “violent” content among children who do not necessarily exhibit any behavioral outcomes from their interactions with this content.  It is an argument against the unitary and determinist language of the “effects” discourse. 

                This is not to say that violent media have no effect on any young people under

any circumstances.  But the intent here is not to measure behavioral effects, either direct or indirect.  Instead, the focus is on the meanings young people make from these media products -- the negotiations adolescents are able to make around media texts which contain elements that are commonly labeled violent.  While not to diminish the tragedies of Columbine or other killings at schools, thankfully the vast majority of young people are not watching violent content and translating it into violent action.  So what are those children -- the majority -- making of what they see in ways that do not lead to recreating it?  That is the focus of this discussion.




Background/Context




                Even before the age of television, research was attempting to answer concerns over the effects of motion pictures on young people.  The most well-known early studies were sponsored by the Payne Fund, beginning in 1928 with 18 researchers and resulting in  the groundbreaking Motion Pictures and Youth (Charters, 1933).  They were the earliest of a tradition of studies under the behaviorist paradigm, looking at the effects media messages have on young people’s actions and reactions.

                The studies of what children do with the media and its messages, or the meanings children take from television programs, are much newer.  These studies are consistent with Hall’s (1980) schema of active decoding of texts by audience members -- in this case, the audience members being children.  Some exemplars in this vein include Wartella (1979), Dorr (1983), Palmer (1986), Hodge and Tripp (1986), Wolf (1987), Buckingham (1993), and Gunter and McAleer (1997).  While these studies each have a different focus and methodology, they all operate from the assumption that children are not fools or passive dupes who are able to be affected against their wills, and that they use their own life experiences, as well as their experience with the media, to make sense of the programs they see.  As Gunter and McAleer argue,

 

Viewers are not empty vessels -- not even young viewers.  Nor do they passively accept all that television tells or shows them.  There are a number of ways children learn to understand television and make sophisticated judgements about programmes.  (1997, p. 39)

                The purpose in this paper is to examine the ways children reflect their understanding and judgements about media content, particularly content which commonly falls under the label “violent”.

                Buckingham (1993) contends that the anxiety about the effects of television on children “often prevents us from acknowledging the complexity of children’s relationship with the medium and taking seriously what they have to say about it” (p. vii).  The debate over media effects, he says, is generally carried out by adults on behalf of children, rather than focusing on talking to the children themselves.  Dorr (1980) suggests that examining how children’s own understanding of the medium may modify the nature and extent of the presumed effects is a way to expand our knowledge of television’s influence on children.

                Cumberbatch and Howitt (1989) argue that much of the media violence research assumes no distinctions exist for the viewer between violence to be condoned or condemned, to be appalled by or laughed at.   They say much of the research (as well as much of the public rhetoric, I would add) does not take program genre into account, so a cartoon like Tom and Jerry or The Roadrunner can appear to be the most violent programs on television. 

 

The use of the term ‘violence’ as if it were an easily defined homogeneous group of actions is a nonsense.  ‘Violence’ on television can cover an enormous diversity of acts taking place in different contexts for different reasons and with quite different messages for different viewers. (1989, p. 48)

                Cumberbatch and Howitt believe viewers do make distinctions.  This is the same argument proposed by Newcomb a decade earlier (1978), that symbols of violence have different meanings for different groups -- and for the same group in different contexts.  Similarly, Gunter and McAleer (1997) argue that viewers -- including children -- can and do discriminate between types of programs and the way in which they depict events, and that this contextual perception is a significant mediator of how viewers respond to television.  The research contained herein indicates adolescents are making the distinctions, regardless of whether the media violence discourse does or not.  I am arguing that adolescents sort through the maze of media violence in much more complex and nuanced ways than the effects tradition would have us believe.

                One way they appear to do this is through what Fiske (1987) calls "cultural competence".

 

Cultural competence involves a critical understanding of the text and the conventions by which it is constructed, it involves the bringing of both textual and social experience to bear upon the program at the moment of reading, and it involves a constant and subtle negotiation and renegotiation of the relationship between the textual and the social. (1987, p. 19)[1]

                A number of researchers have documented how children display this competence in helping them interpret the visual media.  Wolf (1987) demonstrated that children as young as 5 begin to understand the narrative and production conventions of television, including plot development, use and intention of audio effects, and such production techniques as chromakey.  While the children do not understand how some of the techniques are accomplished, they understand the principle of their use.

                In this research, I have found examples of children applying their cultural competence, their understanding of the conventions and constructions within media texts, to make sense of the messages they encounter.  They do this through making distinctions about various program genres they encounter, as well as production techniques used within these texts -- things such as camera angles, special effects, and use of music.  These competencies will be illustrated with examples below.




  Added Dimensions




                Like the tradition referenced here, the aim of this paper is to explore the complex ways children actively make meaning from visual media.  It is intended to add to the discourse about children as actively engaged in constructing meaning from media texts by focusing specifically on how they engage with “violent” content. 

                One difference between this work and previous studies is that the interviews were conducted in family and individual settings, rather than peer discussions as much of the other work with children (cf. Hodge and Tripp, Wolf, Buckingham).  This eliminates the elements of social performance that has been noted in those other studies.

                Diverging from much of the previous work, this study focuses on children’s own inventories of media, not their reactions to pre-selected texts.  The pioneering audience researcher David Morley noted the importance of this distinction between his study of audience reaction to the Nationwide news program (1980) and his later work on family television viewing (1986).  Morley argued that the responses to Nationwide he observed were there in part because the content was imposed on the subjects.  He asserted that the more interesting question is what kinds of material people are interested in watching, and which kinds they are not, when given more natural freedom of choice.  This becomes important in the current study because looking at what media children do engage with in a natural setting helps highlight some of the differences between their actual practices and understandings and the discourses which surround them. 




Intersection of Discourse and Experience




                The discussion about violence and how young people negotiate meanings from such content highlights an interesting intersection of the difference that can exist between an individual’s engagement with the media sphere and the larger discourses of media influence and effects.  The different interactions evident here are what we in the Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse project[2] have come to refer to as experience in and accounts of the media.[3]  The accounts of the media represent the familiar normative assertions, in which informants “can be seen to step back and comment on the media from a position of distance by embracing what we recognize as 'public scripts' about the media” (Hoover and Clark, 1998, p. 7).  These are the occasions when informants express what they think they should say about television content, in which they reiterate some of the common public discourses about the deleterious effects of the media.  Hoover and Clark argue that the accounts of the media often seem abstract and artificial, and that “the actual behaviors and meanings-made take place under entirely different conditions of conceptualization and practice” (1998, p. 7).  These accounts of the media represent a powerful discourse -- using discourse in the same way it is defined by Fiske (1987), as a socially located and produced way of talking or thinking about a topic.   

                The accounts of the media are consistent with McQuail’s (1997) argument that evaluative attitudes about the media are somewhat superficial and learned as socially desirable rather than deeply internalized.  In the case of media violence, the public discourse is so strong and unequivocal about the effects of violent content on children that

the social desirability of adopting that discourse is quite high.  But whether those attitudes consistently translate into action is an open question.  I have found a number of cases in which the accounts of media violence are inconsistent with practice, and with children’s and families’ experiences in actual media content. 

                As applied in the Lifecourse project, experiences in the media are the ways in which people talk about media texts -- programs, plots, characters, etc.  Hoover and Clark assert that attention to experiences in the media “affirms the importance of listening to audience members and using the categories of analysis they employ as a starting point for our own analysis” (1998, p. 7).  This is indicative of what Hoover (1996) identified as an emerging trend of reception analysis, which is “rooted in the perspective of the subject, and draws its understandings from the constructions made by the subject” (1996, p. 10). 

                Let me return briefly to the work of Stuart Hall (1980), and suggest how his categories of textual decoding -- dominant, negotiated or oppositional -- might be applied to an understanding of the different interactions under consideration here.  The dominant reading of media texts in this genre is consistent with the accounts of the media: “all media violence causes violent behavior”.  Other interpretations of violent content, such as the ones made by children in this study, are more like negotiated or oppositional readings which challenge the dominant interpretation.  Using this conceptualization highlights the tensions between different readings of violent content.  Any interpretation other than the one which equates media exposure with violent behavior is outside the mainstream.

                One example of the tensions between accounts of and experiences in the media is how families justify letting their children watch the movie Braveheart.  Two families who generally forbid their children to watch R-rated movies have allowed their children, one as young as 6, to watch Braveheart.  Even though it is at times brutally violent, it is historical violence, and for them that makes it acceptable.  Two different families from very different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds talk in very similar terms about their justification for allowing Braveheart, although it is clear they understand that it is not consistent with the prevailing accounts of media violence. 

 

Terry Albert, age 42 (father of 8-year-old Sam):

Is it brutal?  Yea, it’s brutal, but that’s life.  Did those things really happen on the battlefield?  Yes, times a million.  Ever since man’s walked on the earth there’s been battles like that.  And to think that they’re out there with wooden swords and wearin’ band-aids is ridiculous.  Some would say that’s the wrong thing to do, to allow my 8-year-old to watch that.

                His wife Rachel also agreed to let Sam and his younger sister Hannah watch the film, although she admits she was against the idea at first.  An almost-identical discussion happened in another family, the Hansens.  Nadine Hansen finally consented to letting her son watch the film after being convinced by her husband.

 

Blair Hansen, 44 (father of Trevor, 10):

Braveheart...probably leads the league in number of guys who were killed in that movie.  The battlefield scenes are very graphic.  But then again, I think it depicts how life was during that particular time in history, and they do a pretty good job of making you feel what it was like to live back then.

                Interestingly enough, what bothered Blair Hansen more than the battles scenes was  "after they got married".  It was during that sexually suggestive scene, not the battle scenes, that the Hansens made Trevor turn his head while they fast-forwarded the tape.  (The prevalence of sexual content is another common account of the media.)

                Often the accounts of the media are articulated by parents, but children are aware of their stance.  Palmer (1986) documented how children could anticipate or quote critical comments of parents or teachers toward the programs the children themselves liked.

Sometimes these received discourses are expressed by young people themselves, usually in such a way that one can surmise these probably came from their parents or from the larger social discourse.  Yet these young people’s experiences in the media are much different.  I would like to highlight two families who illustrate the junction and the conflict between their media experiences and the common public scripts.




The Parks




                The Parks are a lower-middle class family who live in a rural area.  Ryan and Janet Park, both 35, are high-school educated.  Their sons, Michael and Cary, are 10 and 9, respectively.  Their family accounts of the media are consistent with the violence discourse.  Both parents articulate a rule against watching violent programming.  Michael, at 10, has adopted the family discourse.  In an individual interview with only this researcher present, he says:

 

I know for a fact that we shouldn't see R-rated movies when we're children, because it gets an effect on our lives.  It'd be like...or in the video games, oh, it's a game.  And even though they know that when they're grown-ups that it is not a game, they still have the urge to do things like that.  Like serial killers and just plain old murderers.

                Yet it is clear that their family’s practice is very different from what they say they believe.  Their experiences in the media are quite different from their accounts of the media.  Janet Park reports really liking the James Bond movies, and says the violence does not bother her because it's fantasy.  "They're so bizarre that they're entertaining," she says.  Both Cary and Michael describe numerous R-rated movies they have seen with their parents, both in the theater and at home.

                And despite Michael's statement that R-rated movies will turn children into serial killers or just plain old murderers, he and his brother actually exhibit ways in which they negotiate their way through the content.  Their mother says she does not want her sons to watch scary movies because she fears they will have nightmares.  But there is evidence that the Park boys are differentiating between types of “scary” content, and that negotiation is a conscious one.  Cary says the movie Carnivores II did not scare him because it was about dinosaurs, and “dinosaurs don't live these days.”  

                Cary and Michael both talk enthusiastically about the movie Starship Troopers, which is rated R.  They both rank it among their favorite movies.  Their father took them to see it at a movie theater, despite Ryan’s contention that R-rated movies are off limits.  Both boys found the movie acceptable for them because the troopers are fighting aliens and giant bugs -- clearly unrealistic opponents.  This is consistent with Dorr's (1983) findings that children invoke knowledge about visual production and utilize form cues, such as whether the characters are human or animated, to guide their assessments about a program’s realism.  She asserts that by age 8, a majority of children have some understanding that entertainment programming is fabricated. 

                Gunter (1985) found that for viewers he surveyed, violence in clearly fantastic settings, such as cartoons or science fiction, were perceived as essentially non-violent, non-frightening, and non-disturbing.  Furthermore, the futuristic settings of science-fiction shows were apparently perceived to be so distant from everyday life that any violence in them was dismissed as relatively harmless fantasy.

                These are examples of children applying their cultural competence to negotiate the minefield of media choices.  Knowledge of production techniques can mitigate what children might otherwise find disconcerting.  Cary admits he was frightened after seeing previews for a werewolf movie, but when he figured out that the werewolf was computerized, he thought that was “cool.”

                Another way the Park boys differentiate between types of violent content is the amount of blood in a scene.  That is to say, they discriminate by how graphic the violence is, but Michael talks about it in the concrete way that kids often do.  This phenomenon was identified by Van der Voort (1986), who reported that children have their own scales for deciding on the seriousness of incidents of violence.  Here is how we see the evidence of that in Michael's case.  He describes The Devil's Own, an R-rated movie with a lot of killing, saying he does not consider it really violent.  “You don't see any blood.  You see parts flying but you don't see any blood,” he explains.  He describes one scene in which a character has been decapitated, but the viewer does not see any blood, and besides, the head looked fake -- “like a bowling ball with a hat on it,” as he put it.  He knows, at least on some level, how special effects are done.  And he has developed his own rating system based on how much blood there is.

 

Michael: I like medium violence in action movies.  Not like he shot 'em and you see the blood.  He shot him and the next time you see him he's a little bit bloody.

Researcher: So when you say medium violence, do you rate that by how much blood you see?

Michael: No, I rate that by how much blood you see coming out, how much you actually see pouring.

                Michael applies the same "rating" system, if you will, to his video games.  And despite his parents telling him, "We can do without the blood and gore stuff," this is another example where his experience in the media does not match his parents’ accounts of the media -- where the practice does not match the parlance.

 

In Killer Instinct you can turn the blood on low, medium, high, and off.  When it's on high, once it falls it disappears.  In Mortal Kombat you can't turn it off.  It falls and stays there for like 30 seconds, and then it disappears.

                He describes the blood in video games as being "cheap,” and says he and his brother do not pay attention to it.  And they do have their limits.  Cary says he and Michael actually stopped watching a movie they had been watching with their parents, because the boys thought there was too much blood.  This is consistent with Palmer’s (1986) finding which dispels the notion that children always want to watch adult TV.  In this case, it was Cary and Michael who decided they did not want to watch what was being offered.

                And despite his bravado, there is some media content that scares Michael.  It pivots on a production issue -- whether there is music or not.  He says he does not like R-rated movies with no music “because it's really like real life.  I mean, you don't have music in real life, unless you listen to a radio while you're killing somebody.”  He describes one movie he saw that did not have music, and he said it was "just gross".  This would seem to be an example of a phenomenon identified by Himmelweit et al. (1958), that children found televised violence in realistic settings more uncomfortable or frightening than those in settings more removed from everyday reality.  If the lack of music makes this depiction more real for Michael Park, then it helps explain why he finds it more disturbing than if he has the other production cues to remind him that it is fiction.  Similarly, his brother Cary reports an episode of Unsolved Mysteries was “sort of scary, ‘cause it was real.”

                Using music as a cue is evidence of Michael applying his cultural competence to the content.  He knows that scary or ominous music is used as a production technique, and he is disturbed -- he notices -- when it is not there.  It is not uncommon for viewers to use music as a marker in the meanings they take from visual media.  Altman (1986) argues that for television, the soundtrack dominates the image by determining when we actually look at the screen.  It hails us back to the television set when we have turned away.  A number of researchers have identified this function of television for children (Anderson and Lorch, 1983; Huston and Wright, 1983).

                My research has found another way this works for children, however, such as the case of 9-year-old Melanie Schwartz.  Melanie says she knows by the music when a “bad part” is coming up, so she closes her eyes.  Melanie, like Michael Park, is demonstrating how cultural competence -- in this case, understanding how the music is used to evoke certain tensions and emotions -- is used by children to make sense of the content they see.

                The Parks are a clear example of a family that has adopted the public accounts of media violence, but for whom the actual practice and meaning-making is different.  Are they conflicted between what they know they are expected to say and what they actually adopt internally?  There is considerable evidence that the answer is “yes”.  This conflict manifests itself in several ways -- in the clear differences between their stated rules and reported practices, and even in the way Janet Park critically reflects on the received discourse she so facilely presents in other ways.     

 

Janet: There's all this stuff in the literature, in the papers, that are trying to pinpoint all behavior problems on TV watching.  Well ok, but what else goes on in the family? ... Watching all this TV isn't gonna make your child violent unless you don't deal with it.

                Both Janet and her son Michael dismiss the claims about violent cartoons as silly.  And in the end, it seems clear that Janet does not believe that watching some violent content will turn her child into a "plain old murderer," as her son said.




The Murphy-Gordons




                The Murphy-Gordons are an upper middle class, urban family.  Both parents, Sheryl Murphy and Lanny Gordon, have Ph.D.'s.  Their children are Paul, 13, and Erin, 10.  Like the Parks, their family accounts of the media mirror the public script of anti-violence.  Sheryl believes that violence in the media naturalizes it, and that “it's connected with all other corroding effects in our society.”  The stated family rule is that the children are not allowed to watch violent content on television or in movies or to play what their parents consider violent video games.  Yet they own video copies of Independence Day, Men in Black and Mission: Impossible -- all movies which some might say have some violent content -- and as a family they went to see the latest James Bond movie.

                Their family has found ways to reconcile their accounts of and experiences in the media in ways that they do not see as inconsistent.  In a family interview, immediately after Sheryl told me that violence was the major prohibition in the household, Paul mentioned that they own Independence Day.  That led to this exchange:

 

Sheryl: Well, Independence Day is...

Erin: Aliens, Paul!  It's science fiction.

Researcher: So is Independence Day ok, then?

Sheryl: Yea, somehow that worked its way into the house and we've all seen it together.

                Later, in an individual interview, Paul referred to the violence in movies such as Independence Day as “all cheesed up” and not realistic.  For him, “cheesed up” violence is not on the same level as more realistic portrayals.

 

Paul: Yea, like I don't think real graphic violence is appropriate and necessary.  But like, some of it can just be funny, when it's like so overacted-type thing, where the actors try too hard.

                Paul’s use of the terms “appropriate” and “necessary” reflects his awareness of a broader discourse surrounding media violence.  He does not completely dismiss the discourse, but he does not believe it applies to kids his age, 13.

 

Paul: I don’t think it reflects on how people act, unless they’re real little.  Well, not real little, but between...up to when they’re about 10 or 11.  After that I don’t think people are influenced by movies as much.  But I still think it’s a good rule.

                This is consistent with a phenomenon identified by Cullingford (1984) and Buckingham (1987), of young informants willing to accept the notion of harmful effects but attempting to displace them onto children younger than themselves.  In Paul’s case his sister is the age at which he thinks there still may be harmful influences from the media.

But Paul's sister Erin, who is almost 11, makes similar distinctions.  For instance, she says of the violence in Jurassic Park: “it's kind of considered violence, but it's like dinosaurs doing it, not like guns or something.” 

                Then we talk about Independence Day, which she had labeled so emphatically in the family interview as science fiction. 

 

Erin: Yea, science fiction.  You know, it's not gonna happen. But you know, it's like, when you're seeing movies that have, like, violence that's happening around in the world, that's the kind of stuff that we don't like.

                Notice how she uses the collective we, to reflect the broader accounts of the media she has learned from her family.  She adds that she does not particularly like science fiction movies, but that they do not scare her.  She thought the movie Men in Black was disgusting because of the giant bugs.  Erin and her brother, like Michael and Cary Park,  reflect Gunter’s (1985) findings that violence in clearly non-realistic settings is not generally thought to be disturbing for at least older children.  It is a way in which the Murphy-Gordon children, like the Parks, apply their cultural competence to mitigate possible behavioral or emotional effects from these texts.

                The prohibition against violent video games is a point of contention in the Murphy-Gordon household, and it is clear the children are making some different judgements about these games than their parents. 

 

Paul: Final Fantasy Seven is a fun game, but I probably couldn't have that.

Researcher: And would you consider it violent?

Paul: No, it's not.  What I consider to be violence is like graphic-type stuff.  'Cause, like, Mario Brothers is violent if you consider jumping on little mushrooms' heads violent.

                His tone here seems sarcastic, and he seems to highlight an extreme of the media violence discourse.  He goes on to say that Final Fantasy Seven, the game his parents will not let him have, is more of a role-playing, puzzle-solving game.  He finally concedes that it is “semi-violent” -- “You fight, but it's not really realistic.  You use magic and stuff like that,” he says.

                Erin, as well as her father, also make distinctions about levels of violence in video games.  Both of them talk about Crash Bandicoot, which the family has concluded is acceptable.

 

Erin: The closest to violence is when you spin a lady off a cliff, and she pushes you off, too.  But it's cartoons, it's not really real people.  So it's not a big deal.

                In this case, her father agrees.

 

Lanny: There's a bandicoot game where you have to pound your way through obstacles by defeating your enemies, but they're such bizarre enemies you don't ever get a sense you're getting rid of a human being.

                This is an important distinction for the Murphy-Gordons, whether the violence involves real human beings or some sort of clearly identified non-human "other".  It is a distinction not only made by the children, but by their parents.  In the family interview, after Paul had left the room, his parents told me he is bothered by what Sheryl calls "realistic violence."   If the target of violence is an alien or a bug, that is tolerable, but Lanny says Paul is "devastated" if a human being is the victim and he can empathize with the pain of the other person.

                The family prohibition against realistic violence carries over to how they deal with news.  When Paul was six years old, he was disturbed by watching coverage of the Gulf War on television, and consequently his parents stopped watching the early evening news.  Sheryl still hides the front page of the newspaper from her children if there is something she thinks is disturbing.  And Lanny says he is glad his children do not watch the news at this point in their lives.[4]

                But ultimately, the Murphy-Gordons have decided that they cannot avoid all the content which might fall under the violence prohibition.  Instead, they have made what Lanny calls a "cultural accommodation," one which reflects a questioning of the dominant accounts of the media.

 

Lanny: Our kids live in a culture...I mean, the kids are seeing these things, and a lot of kids who see them aren't turning around being murderers.  So it's not like necessarily those things lead to something negative.  So I think it's a cultural accommodation.

                And Sheryl even shows signs that she does not entirely accept her own accounts of the media.  She says media are pervasive, but not monolithic.

 

Sheryl: There are various discourses, things that counteract.  People do different things with them.  Humans are not blanket consumers of media values.  They're both shaped (by them) but also are shaping back.

                Despite their stated prohibitions, both Sheryl Murphy and Lanny Gordon display some sense of their children’s cultural competence to discriminate between various media products which might be labeled violent.




Implications for Further Research




                These two cases illustrate some of the difficulties families have in maintaining consistency between their anti-violence discourse and the actual practices and experience of their children with media.  This is not to suggest that parents should abandon all efforts to guide what their children watch, to the extent they feel it is necessary and appropriate in their own households.  But what I have tried to illustrate is that the received public scripts about media violence put many families in tension between that discourse and their own experiences.  I have tried to argue that, as Sheryl Murphy said, “Humans are not blanket consumers of media values,” and that many children are capable of making judgements about media products, even those commonly labeled “violent.”  Perhaps examining the ways in which children make sense of what they see can help in the understanding sought from so many different factions surrounding this topic.  

                Further work in this area might include a more in-depth exploration of family belief systems and how they affect family discourse and children’s processing of violent messages, as well as an analysis of how such factors as class and ethnicity may affect that processing. 

                What I have attempted here is to add richness and depth to the challenge set out by Hodge and Tripp in Children and Television (1986):

 

Only with a due sense of the complexity of meaning processes can anyone hope to do justice to children’s television. (p. 5)

                It seems to me that understanding the complexity of children’s negotiation with violent media is in itself a much more complex process than the effects tradition would have us believe.  More fully understanding how children who do not display behavioral effects process these messages is a way to reconceptualize the media violence discourse in a way that perhaps could prove useful to a more complete exploration of this public debate.




 

REFERENCES

 

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Buckingham, David (1993).Children Talking Television: The Making of Television Literacy.London: Falmer Press.

 

---, (1987).Public Secrets: EastEnders and its Audience.London: British Film Institute.

 

Charters, Werrett Wallace (1933).Motion Pictures and Youth. New York: Macmillan.

 

Cullingford, C. (1984).Children and Television.Aldershot: Gower.

 

Cumberbatch, Guy and Dennis Howitt (1989).A Measure of Uncertainty: The Effects of the Mass Media.

 

Dorr, Aimee (1983). “No Shortcuts to Judging Reality.” In Jennings Bryant and Daniel R. Anderson (eds.), Children’s Understanding of Television: Research on Attention and Comprehension.New York: Academic Press.

 

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