WHAT DOES MEDIA VIOLENCE DO? FIVE QUESTIONS

I’ve been thinking lately about the portrayal of violence in the stories we tell ("the news", movies, television, literature, music, games, and any other form of storytelling). The typical response is two-sided: one says that violence in media can cause violence in the real world, and that we should censor it; the other that there is no relationship between media violence and real world violence, that it would encroach freedom of speech to try to limit it.

Ironically the former group tends to be the one most committed to talking about “freedom” and personal responsibility, tending to downplay any analysis of the world that sees humans as participants in systems and structures that can limit or encourage certain behaviors. This group, committed to freedom and personal responsibility might like to censor storytelling because people can’t be trusted not to be influenced by it.

And the latter group tends to promote a systemic analysis of how the availability of resources is shaped by social structures, but doesn’t see the stories we tell as one of those resources, or the systems of meaning we have evolved to be a possible part of the problem when it comes to the way we tell stories that involve violence.

In other words - the “conservative” response to violence in media might actually be a progressive one, and the “progressive” response might actually be a conservative one.

They’re both partly right, but only skim the surface. I think the question of media violence is at least fivefold: 

1: Does it de-sensitize us to violence in the real world, meaning that we care less about real violence than we should?

2: Does it over-sensitize us to violence in the real world, meaning that we over-predict it, and become paranoid or overly anxious, and more likely to support authoritarian policies or even further violence to repress the violence that we have overstated in the first place?

3: Does it tell the truth about how violence actually happens - where it comes from, who does it and why, what it causes in the lives of its targets, and what it costs the people who enact it?

4: Might it, on the other hand, provide a helpful catharsis, releasing pent-up energy in the lives of those who might otherwise commit acts of aggression, but for whom watching - and imaginatively participating in - story violence might be enough to "get it out of their system"?

5: Does it promote, challenge, or transcend the myth of redemptive violence - i.e. what does it say about the idea that violence can redeem or cleanse things?

Still pondering - and I welcome the conversation.