CPN Remix Podcast

Action. Welcome to our podcast about societal media and media implications. Today we're going to dive deep into the controversial topic of violence in the media and its potential impact on society. From video games and movies to television and social media, violence is prevalent in many forms of media. But does exposure to violent content really lead to an increase in aggressive behavior sensitization to violence? Or is it simply a form of entertainment that has no significant impact on our behavior? And we're also going to talk about music, how it's a universal language and its implications on our society. We'll be exploring these questions and more with our guest expert, Dr. Louis Surla-Gardin, who will be sharing their insights and perspective on this complex and important topic. My research paper is about media violence. So media violence is this theory that the portrayals of violent acts on the internet, whether it's on social media or television, the news media, social networking platforms, video games, have dramatically desensitized us from violent acts and aggressions. Now, as a consequence of this high level of exposure, the media have greater access and time to shape young people's attitudes, including us as teenagers, and actions that parents or teachers do, replacing them as educators, role models, and the primary sources of information about the world and how one behaves in it. Now, Dr. Rosengarden, what is your take on this theory of media violence and how one should approach this issue? That's quite a complicated question, Sally. Thank you for asking it of me and having me participate. I think that there are controversies abounding in every perspective that you can bring to this vast topic. If we're looking at the idea of games, music, art in general, movies, being the source of inspiring further violence, I think there is no set study that everyone acknowledges of demonstrating that. There are a lot of theories. One idea to explore is that humans are symbolic in nature. We think symbolically. In essence, our symbols become our reality, more than the actual interface with reality. Our language is symbolic, and then the things you mentioned, movies, video, are all symbolic, and that's how we understand each other. Are those symbols actually real, and do they have a connection to real, live activities? This is where the sociologists and the psychologists weigh in, perhaps the musicologists. I'm not any of those first two categories, but what I do know in terms of researching the topic, particularly from a psychological standpoint, is that there is a prevalent theory that if you engage in, let's call it, make-believe violence or symbolic violence, and this goes back to Freud and others, that that actually serves to sublimate violent impulses. You're getting them out in a field of play, like sports, where the goal isn't to kill the combatant, just to win in a friendly competition, or to mimic violence. From that, I would think that we should then be less violent. All of these things exist. It's sort of the cart before the horse. All of these things exist in our society because we have a violent society. How do we explain where that comes from? That's a separate question altogether. But does one lead to the other directly? Well, if kids are playing a violent video game, and they're pressing a button, and there's a symbolic monster figure that gets killed, I think the suggestion is that most kids would know that that's a game. And they're not then thinking that they need to find that kind of computerized weapon to take down monsters in real life, which don't exist. But these are violent acts. So on the other side of the coin is that it just enhances our violent tendencies. But sublimation is supposed to also be happening. This is supposed to be a helpful way to deal with, if you have violent impulses, get them out in some other way that's non-injurious. Do you think we as a society have a responsibility to address the violence in media that we're being exposed to? Yeah, so can I ask you a question, Zach? When you say violence in media, Leonie, what do you mean by that? Is it the coverage of the violence that's already happening, or is it the media seems to be promoting it? I feel like it's both in hand. To elaborate, the coverage that we're getting, I feel like it's too vulgar. I go on Instagram and I find a video of someone getting shot. I just feel like that specifically shouldn't be online, but we should be talking about their stories, if that makes sense. Yeah, so of course, what is the media's role, also known as the fourth estate, beyond the three branches of government? They view their responsibility as truth-tellers to report what's happening. Of course, now we're in the world of social media. Well, Instagram doesn't have that same responsibility, so that enters into another realm. We can't lose sight of the fact that we are in perhaps the most violent society ever to have existed, by far, and that's the news. So it would be, if the media's responsibility to show it to us, when it's happening on Facebook and Instagram, then it becomes a manipulative political pawn. And just as an example of that, because I'm old enough to go back to the Vietnam War, for instance, which over time garnered mass protest against America's involvement in Vietnam, late 60s, early 70s, and it was the case back then that when American soldiers were killed, they would be placed in coffins. Sorry for this. See, now I'm promoting that. And the coffins would be draped in American flags. They'd arrive at our airports, and the media would cover it. And you'd see this mass death of American boys, many believed shouldn't even be there to begin with, every night on the news. After that war, somehow there was a prohibition on showing such a thing. And we wouldn't get the same statistics. So I think that that is irresponsible, by not showing those deaths, because people came to know what was really happening, and it inspired the protest against the violence. And in fact, there's a famous song that was played at Woodstock by country Joe McDonald and the Fish. It was called, I Feel Like I'm Fixing the Die Rag. And the tagline was, be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box. Now, everybody knew that they didn't mean that directly, that it was satirical. But all of these things, the knowledge of it served us in the direction of being anti-violent. Today, when we get to, say, rap music, for instance, which does have the violence of lived experience, again, people are saying, it's promoting violence. It's just interesting to me that in all other instances where there's violence in music, the Star Spangled Banner, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, the Beatles' Happiness is a Warm Gun, we're like, yes, we know they're not promoting violence. But when it comes to rap, all of a sudden, they are. And I think it's, again, a misunderstanding, and it's media's responsibility to say, no, this music is doing what all music has done, which is to express the lived experience. And if it's violent, which we are, then it's expressing it. Does it fuel it? I really don't believe that music inspires entire movements unless people are ready for it. I'm sorry to go on in length, but my last example of that is people say of Elvis Presley, if that's a name for you, going back, again, a few decades, his gyrations, tight clothes, his longer hair, right, there's a recent movie, so folks are re-familiarized with him, that all of that unleashed the sexual revolution, and it was too far, it was obscene. But he still has millions and millions of fans, so he connected. If he was doing that music, that dress, those gyrations in 1890, he probably would have been thrown in jail. So it's not like he brought that on, he was expressing what was already being received. Okay. So before we move on to Liane's topic, there are multiple researches that have shown that ever since television and the internet was introduced to the American society, violence has dramatically increased by over 700%, and to me, the fact that American society has become more violent simultaneously, and that some media perspectives in games show characters using physical force to resolve conflict, may not be an accident. Also, as you were talking, a kid just playing a game that has a monster shooting, but nowadays, games are very realistic. There are games like Call of Duty that are played and Ghost Recon Point, where kids actually use military grade weapons, like those AR-15 automatic rifles that kids use in real life to shoot other children in schools, they use those same weapons in their actual games. Although, like you said, there may not be a direct connection to it, I feel we should definitely look into the issue of media violence, specifically media games. Thank you for that. I do think, as you acknowledge, again, I'm not a sociologist or a psychologist, but I do think that there are conflicting studies with conflicting data, so whatever you're citing, it sounds reasonable, but I would still question the idea that we're more violent than we were, and then this is the reason. I think, again, our society is founded on violent revolution, and proudly so, and we have one of our Bill of Rights telling us we should take up arms at a moment's notice, although it does actually say, the first line of it is, a well-regulated militia. People seem to forget that. But anyway, moving beyond that, the Civil War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history, let alone American history. Cousin against cousin, brother against brother. Horrific bloodshed. The Prohibition era, back into the 20th century, in the 20s, once alcohol was made illegal, everybody wanted a drink immediately, no matter how bad it tasted, and how legal it was, and you had the speakeasies springing up, and then particularly in places like Chicago, then you had our first mobs, Al Capone, and they were gunning each other down with Tommy guns just to control the dissemination of liquor. There was no television. It did not exist, no computer, but there was blood in the streets, and the police were involved in both fighting it and allowing it to happen, and being part of it. See the film Untouchables. Robert De Niro's Al Capone is an unbelievable performance. That's in a movie about violence, but it's showing it, and we come to understand it. Now, again, who are we studying here? If we look to the southern regions of the United States, from slavery to the Civil War to Reconstruction to Jim Crow, into the 40s and 50s, and today, you have mass violence perpetrated against African Americans, and again, unpunished and unreported. What has changed? How many hundreds, if not thousands, were lynched in the South by men in white coats and hoods, not showing their faces? Now what has changed? We have people with their phones, capturing video. Somebody gets murdered who's unarmed, and it appears to be a response of brutal force. That's not necessary. Those names become instantly known, and we have mass movements fighting that activity. George Floyd, you name it. It starts with Rodney King in Los Angeles in the early 90s, hauled out of his truck unarmed and beaten close to death. He asked, why can't we all get along? Without that video and without capturing his experience, we wouldn't know of any anti-violent response. Okay. Moving forward, the research paper I talked about, what I did research was how music connects us, how it connects us through our emotions, our stories, our ideas, things like that. It also breaks down cultural barriers. For me, instance, I listen to K-pop. I don't know the words, but I enjoy it. Basically, my question to you is, do you think music is a universal language? Why or why not? All right. Well, thank you for that. Those that have taken classes with me know that in certain situations, I bring in this reading by the ethnomusicologist John Blacking, who studied this very question. And the title of one of his prominent books is How Musical is Man? So how musical are human beings? And his conclusion is that we are all very musical, that it's part of our evolutionary advantage over other species and so forth. Without getting into the whole theory. But he's also claiming that our understanding of what music means isn't universal in the way that people might think. So in other words, if it were to be a universal language, then when you play a few notes, right, then we all should say, oh, yes, that's a mouse on the roof. And, you know, no two people would come up with that. What he is claiming is we all have the audio and brain capability, the hearing, to get something from the music. And that's the universal part of it. We can feel it, we can embrace it, and we can have a personal response to it that we can then share with somebody else. But the actual meaning of something, and even the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who wrote very descriptive music, said meaning is something that we construct. That music, a note, a set of notes, inherently has no meaning. So if you think music is sad, it's because our culture has led us to believe that those sounds depict sadness. And just as a test to that, if you go back to Mongolia in the 1300s, if you were to play what we think is a sad minor scale, they wouldn't react to it the same way we do now. So these are culturally constructed. So yes, on the one hand, all humans are musical, more so than our societies allow them to be, Blacking says. But meaning is something we agree upon. We didn't have the wedding music before Wagner wrote it in the 1850s, the third act of Lohengrin. So there was something else depicting wedding. Right now we think, well, that's the wedding. That's the wedding song. But all it is is ba-dum-ba-dum. Right? Those are just some basic notes. I could call that hot dog grilling. And oh yes, that's definitely hot dog grilling. Ba-dum-dum. Moving on to music. So I want to ask a question to both of you. How has technology and just this idea of ethnocentrism impacted the music industry and just the way we consume it? I don't have an answer yet. So are you referring to ethnocentrism particularly in our culture? Yeah. Or just in general? Just in general. Like how do we define what's good music or not? Is technology impacted to just kind of promote that? Yeah, so of course, maybe we just back up slightly. Ethnocentrism, of course, is an idea that whatever ethnicity, culture, country you are raised in and belong to and have allegiance to, you consider the best. And of course, these have some positive identity, community-forming qualities, and also it can turn violent or virulent once you act on the idea that other cultures or ethnicities are lesser. If you have a dominant ethnicity even within a country or way of life, let's call it, that claims to be superior, then of course adjacent to that claim will be the idea that their music is superior and this is the best music. That being said, the music, and it's been since the 50s on, that dominates the entire world is American music. And that music in particular is African-American derived despite the oppressive difficulties experienced by those folks all along. So does that show that there's certain ethnocentric motives for that? I think in this case, not necessarily. I think it's just great music. It's got the backbeat, blue notes, swing, all of these great things, telling it like it is, right, again and again. So these are endearing qualities despite the fact that you may not think it's coming from a culture that is quote-unquote superior. So it can go both ways. For me, being Dominican, I was raised in a household full of Spanish music. That was all that was played and it wasn't until I grew up and I found music on my own. I guess through social media, it was like trial and error. I would hear certain clips of songs and it was just like, ooh, maybe I like this. I'll add this to my playlist. And now TikTok music is really heavy there. The promotions artists, they blow up on TikTok. That's where I get most of my music from. Well, what else did you ask? Sorry. I think you got it covered. It's just the hot technology. Yeah, yeah. It's like trial and error. You find what you like, you find what you don't like. Technology also does a major part of exposing music to us and artists. Yeah. It's more accessible than ever, in my view. Yeah. I used to lug around records. Whenever I moved as a student, I had a car full of records. I didn't have room for clothes. It was so heavy. And then there were tapes so you could record stuff. And now you just need a little phone and you can download anything in the world. It's unbelievable. Oh, and on a side note, I've got to mention that Dr. Rosengarten is a music history professor and music theory, also sports and music professor on campus. Just a follow-up to everything we've been talking about here. So we started with a very divisive idea like violence and stuff. How can we use music as a means to bridge cultures together? And promote understanding? That was one of my questions, too. For me? Yeah. Yeah, I think it already does that to a certain extent. You know, Nietzsche famously said, the German philosopher, that without music, life would be a mistake. So if you could just imagine sort of the reverse of what you're suggesting where there's no music, no concerts, no music in movies, no music in elevators, well, some of us would prefer that, supermarkets, depending on what kind of music, right? We would have no communal experience around it. So I think to the extent that music exists and exists so richly and that there are millions of fans together cheering and screaming and applauding, it demonstrates that it is working that way. Things would be far worse without it. So I guess your question is, how could we increase that effect? And I think that goes back to, again, how we're enculturated and raised even in our distinct ethnocentric societies, which is we have to do a lot more promoting the idea that understanding humanity and participating in it means we understand everybody and everybody's culture has something to say. And life is so much more rich and interesting when you're exploring that which you haven't experienced instead of being afraid of it. And that's the thing that sets us back. Music has the power to bridge that gap. But the very same people that are listening to certain music may not even realize the derivation of that music. I would even say country music is not possible, without African-American initial input. People don't think of it that way. The banjo, for instance, was originally an African instrument. We don't think of it that way in our culture. But you may have somebody listening to that music who is simultaneously racist but is also enjoying music that is based on African-American influence. So it doesn't always cure those things. But we have to do, I think initially, outside of the music, much more effort in trying to understand the value of human difference in our commonality, if we can put it that way. Just to follow up on that idea, the way I see music build bridges between us is over the World Cup, we have this main song, where a superstar singer comes in. Pitbull, Shakira. Yes, they come and sing. Millions of people just listen to it together. It's very beautiful. It connects people all together. Yes, we look at that in the sports and music class, and I think of that as an internationalized music. It has a bit of a Latin beat behind it, typically. So these clave syncopations. But the whole world is out there celebrating together. I mean, if you just looked at that, if you came from another planet and you just looked at the Shakira video associated with the World Cup, this is a beautiful place. All these different humans celebrating together, coming together in this friendly field of competition with music. But maybe that's not reality. No. Do we have anything to add, or do you want me to conclude? I think we should conclude. Okay. So really, wrapping up, I think addressing the issue of media violence is just one aspect of a much larger problem, which is the prevalence of violence in our society. Because it is imperative that we also address the root of violence, which is poverty, inequality, system discrimination, and the need to just have a safer world for everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right.