Multimedia Research Article #4

As the parent of a 13-year old boy, I am deeply concerned about the effects of telelvision, movies, video games, and music. In his earliest years, his mother and I restricted his viewing to PBS, The Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and TLC. He doesn't watch much PBS anymore, but the others are still among his favorite channels (that's saying something when the competition is the Cartoon Channel). I like to think that his curiosity about the world was in part encouraged by the shows he watched on these channels.

 

I also believe that sheltering a child from the real world is a mistake. Eventually, the child will grow into an adult who is not prepared to cope with life. The trick is in making a best guess about when to introduce more mature content, being able to recognize when it was a mistake, having a plan to withdraw unsuitable content, and recognizing that you will never really know what worked and what didn't but you still have to try your best.

 

Ironically, the content on many of these channels has matured at or near the rate we would have chosen for our son, although maturity is not a word I would apply to some shows, even on these "educational" channels. Along the way my son and I have had some very interesting discussions such as whether ghosts and monsters really exist, why nations go to war, the nature of global warming, and just this morning about whether the Sea Shepherds or the Japanese Whalers are the good guys (I'm trying to convince him that the issue is much more complex than good guys and bad guys, he thinks the Japanese Whalers are the bad guys).

 

With this background in mind, I picked up Research on Learning from Television with great interest, and I wasn't disappointed in general; the paper presents a lot of interesting ideas, and I'm very glad to see so much research going on in this field. However, I was disappointed, though not surprised given the complexity of the issues, that there are so few practical conclusions.  

 

For instance, the section on Catharsis Theory was very interesting. I personally find many violent shows very cathartic, but I remember a time in my early 20s when the same shows would have been more likely to incite me to action (I consider myself lucky to have survived so much reckless stupidity). In my son, I can see both happening simultaneously, the catharsis that allows him to cope with bullys at school without resorting to violence and the eagerness to eliminate the injustices in the world.

 

According to catharsis theory, "viewing televised violence reduces the likelihood of aggressive behavior." I would very much like to think that is true of my son, but how can I know if he is less violent than he might have been. And, if I could tell, how would I know which of the thousands of influences in his life contributed and to what extent. The research certainly seem confused in this regard, "Since catharsis involves a particular type of emotional response, viewing television may or may not elicit that response depending on characteristics of the stimuli, viewers, and other conditions." There are so many variable, it's difficult, perhaps unlikely, that they will ever be sorted out.

 

And this brings me to my pet peeve about statistics. Statistics are (occasionally) predictive of group behavior and nearly worthless at predicting individual behavior. In the community, it would be very worthwhile to know that violence can be reduced in 90% of adolescent boys by prescribing a specific forumla of violent programming. But, what about the 10% that have the opposite reaction? How do you identify them? Should they be identified, segragated, stigmatized? Of course not. But, ....

 

Anglin, G., Vaez, K., Cunningham, K. (2004). Research on Learning from Television. In D. Jonassen (Ed), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (2nd ed., p. 284). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.