See the Show, Be the Show
"You'll never find it now! Heh heh heh heh heh."
Those words came from the mouth of my 2 1/2-year-old son, Henry, a few months ago. We were laughing and playing together on what we affectionately call "the big bed" when Henry suddenly snatched a ball we'd been rolling back and forth and hurled it out of the room.
At the time, I thought, That's kind of cute. It was kind of annoying, too, but mostly cute. I didn't give it much more thought.
Until a couple days later, that is, when we were watching Nickelodeon's animated kids' show Dora the Explorer together. Henry had recently taken a shine to Dora and her crew—including the show's "villain," Swiper the Fox. Swiper, as his name indicates, has a penchant for nabbing something Dora is looking for, then tossing it into a forest, out to sea or down a mountain. And what does he say as he does so? You guessed it:
"You'll never find it now! Heh heh heh heh heh."
That little phrase, along with some mildly rebellious behavior, wasn't just something Henry had dreamed up on his own. He was imitating what he'd seen on TV—right down to the nasally intonation of Swiper's mocking laugh after pilfering something valuable.
I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, part of my job involves monitoring the way media influences young and old alike in all manner of ways. Still, it took my breath away for a few seconds when I saw an example of media's shaping influence that was so stark, so concretely obvious—right there on my "big bed."
Exceptions to the Rule
I suspect if you asked most people if entertainment influences those who consume it, they'd readily answer, "Of course." But I also think most of us would likely point to that influence in the lives of other people, not our own.
Let me explain.
If you've paid any attention to the news over the past few years, you've likely seen stories or read headlines about people imitating something they've seen in a movie, heard in a song or played in a video game. Generally, these stories fall into one of two categories: Unstable, erratic folks doing horrific things, or impressionable, naive children (including those of college age) doing stupid, silly things.
Illustrating the former, a group of four Brits ranging in age from 19 to 40 allegedly mimicked a scene from the 2006 horror spoof Severance when earlier this year they kidnapped 17-year-old Simon Everitt, tied him to a tree, poured gasoline down his throat and lit him on fire—just as happens in the film. The prosecutor in the case said that one of the men involved had exclaimed after watching Severance, "Wouldn't it be wicked if you could actually do that to someone in real life?"
Here's the other side of the coin: In January 2008, two fourth-grade boys in Chesterton, Ind., licked a frozen flagpole in an attempt to disprove the validity of a similar scene in the movie A Christmas Story. "I decided to try it because I thought all the TV shows were lies, but it turns out I was wrong," said Gavin Dempsey. The other boy's mother, Karen Alexander, said, "I thought it was pretty silly of him. I asked him where he got the idea, and he said A Christmas Story. I can't believe he did it, but they learned their lesson."
Our responses to these sorts of stories tend to also fall into two categories: shock or amusement. Most of the time, though, I don't think we see ourselves in these stories. After all, normal people—me and thee—aren't really influenced by the media ... are we?
Entertainment Behavior—Not Entertaining Behavior
It turns out that popular entertainment may be influencing many of us much more deeply than might seem obvious when we focus only on isolated, bizarre incidents. A growing body of research implicates certain media as probable influences when it comes to a wide variety of risky behavior. Most of the scientists involved in this research would say that airtight cause-and-effect relationships are notoriously difficult to prove because the mere correlation of two things doesn't scientifically prove causation. After making that disclaimer, however, the same researchers would have no problem saying that there's a strong link between the entertainment people consume and the choices they make, especially in the case of young people.
Sex: In the last two years alone, several studies have linked consumption of specific media to higher rates of sexual activity and pregnancy. A September 2008 study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that adolescents who consume a lot of sexualized content in movies, television and music are more than twice as likely to have sex by age 16 than their less-exposed peers. Meanwhile, a November 2008 study by the Rand Corp. identified a link between sexually oriented TV shows and teen pregnancy. Specifically, about 25 percent of those who watched shows with the highest levels of sexual content were involved with a pregnancy, compared to about 12 percent of those who watched programs with the lowest amounts of sexually oriented material. Another recent study, led by Dr. Brian Primack, indicated that teens who listen to music with sexually degrading lyrics may be more than twice as likely to have sex as those who don't.
Violence: After parsing 41 separate studies conducted since 1963, University of Michigan researchers L. Rowell Huesmann and Brad Bushman concluded that violent media, including television, film and video games, pose a significant public health threat. Huesmann said, "Media violence increases the risk significantly that the viewer or game player will behave more violently both in the short and long run. ... Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well-known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer."
Smoking: Speaking of cancer sticks, even with a behavior that's increasingly taboo in our culture, entertainment plays a role in modeling it positively for teens. In 2008, the National Cancer Institute published its 19th study on tobacco use in the United States, The Role of Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use. The report's senior scientific editor, Dr. Ronald Davis, summarized its key findings: "This is the first government report to present definitive conclusions that, No. 1, tobacco advertising and promotion are causally related to increased tobacco usage in the population. And, No. 2, that depictions of smoking in movies is causally related to youth smoking initiation." Wow. Notice that this guy doesn't hedge at all. "Causally" doesn't trip him up a bit. That's how sure he is. The study went on to put numbers to the assertions, reporting that "adolescents with higher exposure to smoking in the movies" were 2 to 2.7 times more likely to try smoking.
If it seems that not much good comes from much of the media kids consume, well, that's exactly what researchers at the National Institutes of Health (working with Common Sense Media) concluded after examining 173 studies involving entertainment and behavior. Government researchers found that 80 percent of those studies linked media (defined as TV, movies, video games, music, the Internet and magazines) to adverse outcomes among children, including obesity, sex, smoking, drug and alcohol use, attention problems and poor grades. One of the five study reviewers, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, summarized, "The research is clear that exposure to media has a variety of negative health impacts on children and teens. ... We found very few studies that had any positive association [for children's health]."
Beyond the Behavior
Popular entertainment's potential influence doesn't stop with merely encouraging certain behaviors. What we see and what we listen to also mold our perspective on the world and our attitudes toward moral and spiritual issues—for better or for worse.
Take the recent case of Bella, for example, a movie that deals with a woman considering abortion who ultimately decides to keep her child. The producers of the film said that after its release, they heard from 40 pregnant women who had been considering abortion but decided to give birth instead after seeing the movie.
On the other hand, there was this MTV News story in March 2008 about the increasing popularity of Wicca and witchcraft. "So how does one become a witch?" asked writer Alex Mar. Her answer? "A surprising number of young witches MTV spoke with ... said that they became curious about their faith through misguiding pop-culture fare like the camp Neve Campbell vehicle The Craft and the Harry Potter series." She concluded her thought by adding this parenthetical: "(Guess a few conservative Christian groups were right about that one.)"
Our individualistic culture encourages us to embrace the idea that we can consume whatever we want with no ill effects whatsoever. It's a lie we're willing to swallow because, in part, we have a deeply vested interest in the assumption that our entertainment preferences don't really affect us—or other people, for that matter. Why? We think it's in our best interest to protect the flow of entertainment that, well, entertains us. This stance is personified by the teenager who defends his lousy musical choices by intoning the old saw, "I don't listen to the words, I just like the beat."
Asking Quarrelsome Questions
Naturally, many creators and purveyors of entertainment categorically reject that truth and refuse to take responsibility for how content might influence those who consume it. Last year, for example, an 18-year-old South African who killed another teen and then attacked three other people was allegedly influenced by the metal band Slipknot. The band's lead singer, Corey Taylor, refused to take any responsibility for the fact that Slipknot's violent imagery could have played a role in the murder. "Obviously I'm disturbed by the fact that people were hurt and someone died," Taylor said. "As far as my responsibility for that goes, it stops there. ... At the end of the day, there are always going to be mental disorders and people who cause violence for no other reason than the fact that they're f---ed up and lost."
But some in the entertainment world are beginning to suggest otherwise. In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings that left 32 victims dead in April 2007, screenwriter Mike White (School of Rock, Year of the Dog) wrote in The New York Times, "Hollywood and defenders of violent films dismiss Virginia Tech as a 'unique' event, arguing that [killer Seung-Hui] Cho was profoundly alienated from our culture, not at all a product of it. ... These commentators insist there's no point in debating which came first, the violent chicken or her violent representational egg, since no causal link has ever been proven between the egg and the chicken anyway. ... The notion that 'movies don't kill people, lunatics kill people' is liberating to us screenwriters because it permits us to give life to our most demented fantasies and put them up on the big screen without any hand-wringing. ... [But] can we really in good conscience conclude that the violence saturating our popular culture has no impact? ... Before cashing those big checks, shouldn't we at least pause to consider what we are saying with our movies about the value of life and the pleasures of mayhem?"
Those are tough questions White poses to himself and others in his profession. And they're good ones. But he can't remain one of the few people asking them. Given entertainment's clear ability to mold and guide our attitudes and our choices, we would all do well to ask ourselves similarly probing questions about the way the things we consume might be (are) shaping us.
More to the point, I would do well to ask myself similarly probing questions about what my family consumes.