Under the influence: Mass media and audience passivity

Of course the media affect emotions and behavior. That is why people use them.

—Jeffrey Goldstein (2005, p. 350)

I begin by addressing an assumption, present in both popular discourse and significant bodies of scholarship—especially early-to-mid-20th _{century cultural studies—that mass media entails}

a sharp division between powerful, corporate media producers on the one hand, and powerless consumer audiences on the other, who are the passive recipients of whatever “messages” those producers choose to disseminate. The flow of information is seen as moving in one direction only— from the media elite to the masses. The discourses favoured by the elite must therefore dominate, so that they have unmatched persuasive influence over the creation and consumption of culture. The “culture industry,” as Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2002) originally named it, is hegemony calculated to produce homogeneity, and consumers are cultural “dupes.”

While Adorno, Horkheimer, and other Frankfurt School theorists had good reason to be concerned about the possibility of mass media being used to distort truth, encourage docility, and spread propaganda, the uncompromising cynicism of this view tends to erase the real and

worthwhile work done by the “masses” to interpret, answer, configure, rework, and re-circulate media objects. Despite decades of discourse to bear this out, the claim of passivity has proven tenacious, enjoying the occasional resurgence as a go-to assumption for researchers who find themselves in the position of having to make sense of the next new trend in media.

2.1.1 The spectre of effects studies

Videogames found themselves under this lens from the 1980s to the turn of the century, the heyday of effects studies (e.g. Anderson & Ford, 1986; Provenzo 1991; Dill & Dill, 1998; Kirsh, 1998). Highlighting themes of addiction, aggression, delinquency, and violent crime, this research focused

on what sorts of messages games were communicating to players (especially children), and what impact this has on a player’s thought, behaviour, and perception of the world. According to Provenzo (1991, p. 65), a significant body of work has been devoted to importing two models for understanding the relationship between television content and aggression—catharsis theory and stimulation theory—into the realm of videogames. Goldstein (2005) is highly critical of this “willy- nilly” application of television research, since “video games differ from television and film not only in their interactivity, but in the nature of their stories, in their open-endedness, and in their ability to satisfy different needs of their users” (p. 342).

Some discourses feature an odd mixture of psychological experiments that fail to provide evidence in support of alarmist hypotheses, coupled with vague analysis that seems to try to keep the anxiety alive by leaving open the possibility of a future verification of the social ills of gaming. Kirsh (1998) claims a weak, short-term correlation (in children) between playing a violent game and attributing hostile motives to the actions of others in the real world—a finding that supports the notion that games have effects (however brief), but offers no substantiation of popular claims linking teen violence to gaming. Provenzo (1991, p. 70) admits that there is no evidence that games contribute significantly to deviant behaviour, yet leaves open the door for worry about other unnamed social and cultural “impacts” of gaming. His claim that “concern about the games is in fact justified” (1991, p. 50) apparently hinges not on direct demonstration of effects but rather on the presumption of effects based on game content. The content itself is considered outside of its actual use context and through reports of an anecdotal nature, which cherry-pick what is most exceptional and sensational and re-frame it as typical: Provenzo holds up Custer’s Revenge (Mystique, 1982), a fringe game made by an obscure pornographic games producer for the Atari 2600, as evidence that videogames “have a history of being sexist and racist” in addition to being violent (1991, p. 52). While I do not deny that racist and sexist undertones are and have historically been present in many

mainstream games (although not generally more so than the average Hollywood blockbuster),

Custer’s Revenge is far from representative of the medium’s offerings.

Williams (2003) argues that the “story of vilification and partial redemption” of videogames is tied to the social tensions of the times, particularly the conservative anxieties of the 1980s—thus they probably tell us more about reactionary politics than about games. In fact, the early framings of games research in terms of violence and addiction may have taken its cue from popular media and political discourse, such as the U.S. Surgeon General’s infamous 1982 claim that games were producing “aberrations in childhood behaviour” (Provenzo, 1991, p. 50).

Goldstein (2005), who provides an extensive review of behavioural research on videogame violence from the 1980s through 2001, is unequivocal in his criticism: “Discussions of violent video games are clouded by ambiguous definitions, poorly designed research, and the continued confusion of correlation with causality” (p. 341). Further, “there is no evidence that media shape behavior in ways that override a person’s own desires and motivations” (p. 350).

Effects studies were not universally negative. Williams (2003) describes “utopian” research narratives standing in opposition to these alarmist discourses—studies that tried to partially redeem games by pointing to the ways in which they could educate children, build cognitive skills, or provide a context for positive social interaction among family members (e.g. Mitchell, 1985).

The uniting feature of effects studies, however, is the presumption of passivity. “Missing from research,” writes Goldstein in a passage that (unintentionally?) echoes Caillois (1961), “is any acknowledgment that video game players freely engage in play, and are always free to leave, or pause. Except in laboratory experiments, no one is forced to play a violent video game” (Goldstein, 2005, p. 353). Effects studies fixate on what media do to us, rather than on the far more exciting question of what we can do with them.

If anything, it is ironically the theories of creative-participatory media culture, rather than the tropes of corruption through passive consumption, that are more easily linked to examples of

deviance. When in 2013, a nine-year-old boy was arrested in Orlando, Florida for bringing weapons to school, his father claimed that the boy was indulging in a Minecraft character fantasy, and further argued that there was no chance that the child would have harmed anyone (Thompson, 2013). The following year, 12-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser did harm their classmate Payton Leutner while acting out a twisted fantasy inspired by the “Slenderman”8 _{internet fandom. Actual}

incidents of concern resemble dangerous live-action fanfictions more than cases of violent

behavioural conditioning. They also remain exceptionally rare, and are seldom explainable in terms of media fandom alone—serious mental illness being implicated in the case of Weier and Geyser (Almasy, 2017). It seems that there is not much worthy of true concern for alarmist media researchers to find in the realm of participatory culture, either.