In article <372223e3.1949252 at news.demon.co.uk>, malcolm at pigsty.demon.co.uk
(Malcolm McMahon) wrote:
:What seems to be absolutely constant over time is the way adults are
:astonished by the bad behaviour of children and blame it on whatever the
:latest trend in childrens' entertainment happens to be at the time.
:Socrates, I gather, wrote a piece on how the children of today have no
:respect.
::I'm affraid these school shooting are simply a particularly serious
:"fad". The first got so much publicity it's put the idea into a lot of
:minds.
I find it remarkable that in the search for scapegoats, this has received
so little attention--perhaps because the scapegoat search is being managed
by the news media, who have an obvious self-interest in directing the
public's attention elsewhere. Each of the modern school shootings has been
followed by an escalation of the media attention paid to every aspect of
the perpetrator's lives.
In a country of millions of people, just about any imaginable pathology or
psychotic behavior is going to occur occasionally. But with modern
communications media, the level of commentary and discussion over such
events has increased by orders of magnitude, so that the potential for
such events to shape behavior of other troubled individuals is enormously
increased. Indeed, we've already seen a number of fortunately clumsy
copycat attempts. In the two weeks following the shooting, you could find
some sort of feature on the shooting on some cable TV channel just about
any time of day. And of course, it's all over the internet.
Of course, it's a lot easier to point the finger at popular culture. A lot
of people are always looking for excuses to suppress movies, games, or
music that they find troubling. If the problem is in fact the level of
attention given to such crimes by the news media, a solution is much
harder to come by. Restrictions on media coverage run up against
Constitutional protections, and the financial incentive for feeding the
public's morbid curiousity is so great that voluntary restraint is
unlikely. And while one can reasonably put age restrictions on
entertainment media, it is hard to imagine such restrictions being imposed
on the news media, even if the internet did not make it so easy to
circumvent any such restrictions. Perhaps if the President called for a
6-week moritorium on all news reports about the perpetrators, it would
have some beneficial effect, but the President is also haring off after
videogames with violent-sounding names.
My worry is that we are just seeing the beginning. I can't help wondering
how many other depressed teenagers are sitting glued to their TV screens,
thinking "Nobody really cares about me. But they sure do care about those
guys in the trenchcoats..."