a parable for all of us, from the Red Rock Eater news service:


>  
> Date: Sat, 8 May 99 13:19:28 EDT
> From: Henry Jenkins <[log in to unmask]>
> 
> Prof. Jenkins Goes to Washington
> 
> So many people have asked for the details that I've decided to write
> out a personal narrative that can circulate where-ever anyone wishes.
> 
> This is the story of how a mild mannered MIT Professor ended up being
> called before Congress to testify about "selling violence to our
> children" and what it is like to testify.
> 
> Where to start?  For the past several months, ever since my book, FROM
> BARBIE TO MORTAL KOMBAT: GENDER AND COMPUTER GAMES appeared, I've been
> getting calls to talk about video game violence.  It isn't a central
> focus of the book, really.  We were trying to start a conversation
> about gender, about the opening up of the girls game market, about
> the place of games in "boy culture," and so forth.  But all the
> media wants to talk about is video game violence.  Here is one of the
> most economically significant sectors of the entertainment industry
> and here is the real beach head in our efforts to build new forms of
> interactive storytelling as part of popular, rather than avant garde,
> culture, but the media only wants to talk about violence.  These
> stories always follow the same pattern.  I talk with an intelligent
> reporter who gives every sign of getting what the issues are
> all about.  Then, the story comes out and there's a long section
> discussing one or another of a seemingly endless string of anti-
> popular culture critics and then a few short comments by me rebutting
> what they said.  A few times, I got more attention but not most.
> But these calls came at one or two a week all fall and most of
> spring term.  Then, when the Littleton shootings, they increased
> dramatically.  Suddenly, we are finding ourselves in a national witch
> hunt to determine which form of popular culture is to blame for the
> mass murders and video games seemed like a better candidate than most.
> So, I am getting calls back to back from the LA TIMES, THE NY TIMES,
> The Christian Science Monitor, The Village Voice, Time, etc., etc.,
> etc.  I am finding myself denounced in The Wall Street Journal op-ed
> page for a fuzzy headed liberal who blames the violence on "social
> problems" rather than media images.  And, then, the call came from
> the U.S. Senate to see if I would be willing to fly to Washington with
> just a few days notice to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee
> hearings.  I asked a few basic questions, each of which feared me
> with greater dread.  Turned out that the people testifying were all
> anti-popular culture types, ranging from Joseph Lieberman to William
> Bennett, or industry spokesmen.  I would be the only media scholar
> who did not come from the "media effects" tradition and the only one
> who was not representing popular culture as a "social problem".  My
> first thought was that this was a total setup, that I had no chance
> of being heard, that nobody would be sympathetic to what I had to say,
> and gradually all of this came to my mind as reasons to do it and not
> reasons to avoid speaking.  It felt important to speak out on these
> issues.
> 
> A flashback: When I was in high school, I wore a trenchcoat (beige,
> not black), hell, in elementary school I wore a black vampire cape
> and a medallion around my neck to school.  I was picked on mercilessly
> by the rednecks who went to my school and I spent a lot of time
> nursing wounds, both emotional and some physical, from an essentially
> homophonic environment.  I was also a sucker for Frank Capra movies --
> Mr. Smith Goes to Washington most of all -- and films like 1776 which
> dealt with people who took risks for what they believed.  I had an
> amazing high school teacher, Betty Leslein, who taught us about our
> government by bringing in government leaders for us to question (among
> them Max Clevland, who was then a state legislature and now a member
> of the Commerce Committee) and sent us out to government meetings to
> observe.  I was the editor of the school paper and got into fights
> over press censorship.  And I promised myself that when I was an
> adult, I would do what I could to speak up about the problems of free
> speech in our schools.  Suddenly, this was a chance.
> 
> I also had been reading Jon Katz' amazing coverage on the web of the
> crackdown in schools across America on free speech and expression in
> the wake of the shootings.  Goth kids harassed for wearing subcultural
> symbols and pushed into therapy.  Kids suspended for writing the wrong
> ideas in essays or raising them in class discussions.  Kids pushed off
> line by their parents.  And I wanted to do something to help get the
> word out that this was going on.
> 
> So, it didn't take me long to say yes. 
> 
> I was running a major conference the next day and then I would
> have one day to pull together my written testimony for the Senate.
> I didn't have much in my own writings I could draw on.  I pulled
> together what I had.  I scanned the web.  I sent out a call for some
> goth friends to tell me what they felt I should say to Congress about
> their community and a number of them stayed up late into the night
> sending me information.  And I pulled an all nighter to write the damn
> thing which was really long because I didn't have time to write short.
> And then, I worked with my assistant, Shari Goldin, to get it proofed,
> edited, revised, and sent off to Congress.  And to make arrangements
> for a last minute trip.
> 
> When I got there, the situation was ever worse than I had imagined.
> The Senate chamber was decorated with massive posters of video game
> ads for some of the most violent games on the market.  Many of the
> ad slogans are hyperbolic -- and self-parodying -- but that nuance
> was lost on the Senators who read them all deadly seriously and with
> absolute literalness.  Most of the others testifying with professional
> witnesses who had done this kind of thing many times before.  They had
> their staff.  They had their props.  They had professionally edited
> videos.  They had each other for moral support.  I had my wife and son
> in the back of the room.  They are passing out press releases, setting
> up interviews, being tracked down by the major media and no one is
> talking to me.  I try to introduce myself to the other witnesses.
> Grossman, the military psychologist who thinks video games are
> training our kids to be killers, won't shake my hand when I wave it in
> front of him.  I am trying to keep my distance from the media industry
> types because I don't want to be perceived as an apologist for the
> industry -- even though, given the way this was set up, they were
> my closest allies in the room.  This is set up so you can either be
> anti-popular culture or pro-industry and the thought that as citizens
> we might have legitimate investments in the culture we consume was
> beyond anyone's comprehension.
> 
> The hearings start and one by one the senators speak.  There was
> almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats on this one.
> They all feel they have to distance themselves from popular culture.
> They all feel they have to make "reasonable" proposals that edge up
> towards censorship but never quite cross the constitutional lines.
> It is political suicide to come out against the dominant position in
> the room.
> 
> One by one, they speak.  Hatch, Lieberman, Bennett, the Archbishop
> from Littleton....  Bennett starts to show video clips which removed
> from context seem especially horrific.  The fantasy sequence from
> Basketball Diaries reduced to 20 seconds of Leo DiCaprio blasting away
> kids.  The opening sequence from SCREAM reduced to its most visceral
> elements.  Women in the audience are gasping in horror.  The senators
> cover their faces with mock dread.  Bennett start going on and on
> about "surely we can agree upon some meaningful distinctions here,
> between CASINO and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, between THE BASKETBALL DIARIES
> and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER...".  I am just astonished by the sheer
> absurdity of this claim which breaks down to a pure ideological
> distinction which has neither aesthetic credibility nor any
> relationship to the media effects debate.  Basketball Diaries is an
> important film; CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER is a right wing potboiler!
> Scorsese is bad but Spielberg is good?
> 
> Meanwhile, the senators are making homophobic jokes about whether
> Marilyn Manson is "a he or a she" that I thought went out in the
> 1960s.  These strike me as precisely the kind of intolerant and
> taunting comments that these kids must have gotten in school because
> they dressed differently or acted oddly in comparison with their more
> conformist classmates.
> 
> By this point, we reach the hour when the reporters have to call in
> their stories if they are going to make the afternoon addition and so
> they are heading for the door.  It's down to the C-Span camerawoman
> and a few reporters from the game industry trade press.
> 
> And then I am called to the witness stand.  Now, the chair is
> something nobody talks about.  It is a really really low chair and
> it is really puffy so you sit on it and your butt just keeps sinking
> and suddenly the tabletop is up to your chest.  It's like the chairs
> they make parents sit in when they go to talk to elementary school
> teachers.  The Senators on the other hand sit on risers peering down
> at you from above.  And the whole power dynamics is terrifying.
> 
> Grossman starts to attack me personally, claiming that a "journalism"
> professor and a "film critic" have no knowledge of social problems.
> It takes me a while for the attacks to sink in because they are so far
> off the mark.  I am not a journalism prof. and I am not a film critic.
> I am a media scholar who has spent more than 15 years studying and
> writing about popular culture and I do think I have some expertise
> at this point on how culture works, how media is consumed, how
> media panics are started, how symbols relate to real world events,
> how violence operates in stories, etc., etc. and that's what I was
> speaking about.
> 
> I am doing OK with all of this.  I am surprisingly calm while the
> other people speak, and then Sen. Brownback calls my name, and utter
> terror rushes through my body.  I have never felt such fear.  I try
> to speak and can hardly get the words out.  My throat is dry.  I reach
> for a glass of water and my hands are trembling so hard that I spill
> water all over the nice table.  I am trying to read and the words
> are fuzzing out on the page.  Most of them are handwritten anyway by
> this point because I kept revising and editing until the last minute.
> And I suddenly can't read my writing.  Cold sweet is pouring over
> me.  I have visions of the cowardly lion running down the halls in OZ
> escaping the great blazing head of the wizard.  But there's no turning
> back and so I speak and gradually my words gain force and I find my
> voice and I debating the congress about what they are trying to do
> to our culture.  I take on Bennett about his distorted use of the
> BASKETBALL DIARIES clip, explaining that he didn't mention this was
> a film about a poet, someone who struggles between dark urges and
> creativity, and that the scene was a fantasy intended to express
> the rage felt by many students in our schools and not something the
> character does let alone something the film advocates.  I talked about
> the ways these hearing grew out of the fear adults have of their own
> children and especially their fear of digital media and technological
> change.  I talked about the fact that youth culture was becoming more
> visible but it's core themes and values had remained pretty constant.
> I talked about how reductive the media effects paradigm is as a way of
> understanding consumers relations to popular culture.  I attacked some
> of the extreme rhetoric being leveled against the goths, especially
> a line in TIME from a GOP hack that we needed "goth control" not "gun
> control".  I talked about the stuff that Jon Katz had been reporting
> about the crackdown on youth culture in schools across the country and
> I ended with an ad-libed line, "listen to your children, don't fear
> them".  Then, waited.
> 
> The Senator decided to take me on about the goths, having had some
> staff person find him a surprisingly banal line from an ad for a
> goth nightclub which urged people to "explore the dark side".  And
> I explained what I knew about goths, their roots in romanticism
> and in the aesthetic movement, their nonviolence, their commitment
> to acceptance,their strong sense of community, their expression of
> alienation.  I talked about how symbols could be used to express many
> things and that we needed to understand what these symbols meant to
> these kids.  I spoke about Gilbert and Sullivan's PATIENCE as a work
> that spoke to the current debate, because it spoofed the original
> goths, the Aesthetics, for their black garb, their mournful posturing,
> and said that they were actually healthy and well adjusted folks
> underneath but they were enjoying playing dark and soulful.  The
> Senator tried repeating his question as if he couldn't believe I
> wasn't shocked by the very concept of giving yourself over to the
> "dark side".  And then he gave up and shuffled me off the stand.
> 
> The press warmed around the anti-violence speakers but didn't seem
> to want to talk to me.  I just wanted to get out of there.  I felt no
> one had heard what I had to say and that I had been a poor messenger
> because I had stumbled over my words.  But several people stopped
> me in the hallway to thank me.  And dozens more have sent me e-mail
> since having seen it on C-Span or heard it on the radio or seen the
> transcript on the web or heard about it from friends.  And suddenly
> I feel better and better about what had happened.  I had spoken out
> about something that mattered to me in the halls of national power and
> people out there had heard my message, not all of them certainly, but
> enough.
> 
> I know the fight isn't over -- at least I hope it isn't.  There will
> be more chances to speak, but I felt like I had scored some victory
> just by being there and speaking.  Someone wrote me that it was all
> the more powerful to have one rational voice amid a totally lopsided
> panel of extremists.  People would see this was a witch hunt of sorts.
> I'd like to believe that.
> 
> THe key thing was I got a statement into the record that was able to
> say more than I could in five minutes and people can read it on the
> web at: http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/0504jen.pdf
> 
> What follows is the text of my oral remarks which are rather different
> from the written statement because I was still doing research and
> writing on the airplane.
> 
> I am Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies
> Program.  I have published six books and more than fifty essays
> on various aspects of popular culture.  My most recent books, THE
> CHILDREN'S CULTURE READER and FROM BARBIE TO MORTAL KOMBAT: GENDER
> AND COMPUTER GAMES deal centrally with the questions before this
> committee.  I am also the father of a high school senior and the
> house master of a MIT dormitory housing 150 students.  I spent my
> life talking with kids about their culture and I have come here today
> to share with you some of what I have learned.
> 
> The massacre at Littleton, Colorado has provoked national soul
> searching.  We all want answers.  But we are only going to find valid
> answers if we ask the right Questions.  The key issue isn't what the
> media are doing to our children but rather what our children are doing
> with the media.  The vocabulary of "media effects", which has long
> dominated such hearings, has been challenged by numerous American nd
> international scholars as an inadequate and simplistic representation
> of media consumption and popular culture.  Media effects research most
> often empties media images of their meanings, strips them of their
> contexts, and denies their consumers any agency over their use.
> 
> William Bennett just asked us if we can make meaningful distinctions
> between different kinds of violent entertainment.  Well, I think
> meaningful distinctions require us to look at images in context,
> not looking at 20 second clips in isolation.  From what Bennett just
> showed you, you would have no idea that THE BASKETBALL DIARIES was
> a film about a poet, that it was an autobiographical work about a
> man who had struggled between dark urges and creative desires, that
> the book on which it was based was taught in high school literature
> classes, and that the scene we saw was a fantasy which expressed his
> frustrations about the school, not something he acts upon and not
> something the film endorses.
> 
> Far from being victims of video games, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
> had a complex relationship to many forms of popular culture.  They
> consumed music, films, comics, videogames, television programs.  All
> of us move nomadically across the media landscape, cobbling together
> a personal mythology of symbols and stories taken from many different
> places.  We invest those appropriated materials with various personal
> and subcultural meanings.  Harris and Klebold were darn toward dark
> and brutal images which they invested with their personal demons,
> their antisocial impulses, their maladjustment, their desires to hurt
> those who had hurt them.
> 
> Shortly after I learned about the shootings, I received e-mail for
> a 16 year old girl who shared with me her web site.  She had produced
> an enormous array of poems and short stories drawing on characters
> from popular culture and had gotten many other kids nationwide to
> contribute.  Though they were written for no class, these stories
> would have brightened the spirit of writing teachers.  She had reached
> into contemporary youth culture, including many of the same media
> products that have been cited in the Littleton case, and found there
> images that emphasized the power of friendship, the importance of
> community, the wonder of first romance.  The mass media didn't make
> Harris and Klebold violent and destructive and it didn't make thi girl
> creative and sociable but it provided them both with the raw materials
> necessary to construct their fantasies.
> 
> Of course, we should be concerned about the content of our culture
> and we all learn thing from the mass media.  But popular culture
> is only one influence on our children's imaginations.  Real life
> trumps media images every time.  We can shut down a video game if
> it is ugly, hurtful, or displeasing.  But many teens are required
> to return day after day to schools where they are ridiculed and
> taunted and sometimes physically abused by their classmates.  School
> administrators are slow to respond to their distress and typically can
> offer few strategies for making the abuse stop.  As one Littleton teen
> explained, "Everytime someone slammed them against a locker or threw a
> bottle at them, they would go back to Eric and Dylan's house and plot
> a little more".
> 
> We need to engage in a rational conversation about the nature of
> the culture children consume but not in the current climate of moral
> panic.  I believe this moral panic is pumped up by three factors.
> 
> 1) Our fears of adolescents.  Popular culture has become one of the
> central battlegrounds through which teens stake out a claim on their
> own autonomy from their parents.  Adolescent symbols from zoot suits
> to goth amulets define the boundaries between generations.  The
> intentionally cryptic nature of these symbols often means adults
> invest them with all of our worst fears, including our fear that our
> children are breaking away from us.  But that doesn't mean that these
> symbols carry all of these same meanings for our children.  However
> spooky looking they may seem to some adults, goths aren't monsters.
> They are a peaceful subculture committed to tolerance of diversity and
> providing a sheltering community for others who have been hurt.  It
> is, however, monstrously inappropriate when GOP strategist Mike Murphy
> advocates "goth control" not "gun control."
> 
> 2) Adult fears of new technologies.  The Washington Post reported
> that 82 percent of Americans cite the Internet as a potential
> cause for the shootings.  The Internet is no more to blame for the
> Colombine shootings than the telephone is to blame for the Lindbergh
> kidnappings.  Such statistics suggest adult anxiety about the current
> rate of technological change.  Many adults see computers as necessary
> tools for educational and professional development.  But many
> also perceive their children's on-line time as socially isolating.
> However, for many "outcasts," the on-line world offers an alternative
> support network, helping them find someone out there somewhere who
> doesn't think they are a geek.
> 
> 3) The increased visibility of youth culture.  Children fourteen and
> under now constitute roughly 30 percent of the American population,
> a demographic group larger than the baby boom itself.  Adults are
> feeling more and more estranged from the dominant forms of popular
> culture, which now reflects their children's values rather than
> their own.  Despite our unfamiliarity with this new technology,
> the fantasies shaping contemporary video games are not profoundly
> different from those which shaped backyard play a generation ago.
> Boys have always enjoyed blood and thunder entertainment, always
> enjoyed risk-taking and rough housing, but these activities often
> took place in vacant lots or backyards, out of adult view.  In a world
> where children have diminished access to play space, American mothers
> are now confronting directly the messy business of turning boys into
> men in our culture and they are alarmed at what they are seeing but
> the fact that they are seeing it at all means that we can talk about
> it and shape it in a way that was impossible when it was hidden from
> view.
> 
> We are afraid of our children.  We are afraid of their reactions to
> digital media.  And we suddenly can't avoid either.  Thee factors may
> shape the policies that emerge from this committee but if they do,
> they will lead us down the wrong path.  Banning black trenchcoats or
> abolishing violent video games doesn't get us anywhere.  These are the
> symbols of youth alienation and rage -- not the causes.
> 
> Journalist Jon Katz has described a backlash against popular culture
> in our high schools.  Schools are shutting down student net access.
> Parents are cutting their children off from on-line friends.  Students
> are being suspended for displaying cultural symbols or expressing
> controversial views.  Katz chillingly documents the consequences
> of adult ignorance and fear of our children's culture.  Rather than
> teaching children to be more tolerant, high school teachers and
> administrators are teaching students that difference is dangerous,
> that individuality should be punished, and that self expression should
> be constrained.  In this polarized climate, it becomes IMPOSSIBLE
> for young people to explain to us what their popular culture means to
> them.  We re pushing this culture further and further underground and
> thus further and further from our understanding.
> 
> I urge this committee to listen to youth voices about this controversy
> and have submitted a selection of responses from young people as part
> of my extended testimony.
> 
> Listen to our children.  Don't fear them.
> Henry Jenkins
> 
> 
> --- End Forwarded Message ---
> 
> 
> Professor Steve Woolgar, Director
> ESRC Virtual Society? Programme
> Brunel University
> Uxbridge
> Middlesex UB8 3PH
> England
> +44 (0)1895 203210
> +44 (0)1895 203071 (fax)
> 
> *********************************************************************
> Check the latest additions to the web site at
>                  http://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/virtsoc
> 
> - Brian McGrail's Media Storm!
> - UK-Nordic Initiative on Information and Communication Technologies
> - Evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on E-Commerce
> - Living in Cyberspace: meeting report
>         
> **********************************************************************
> 


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