TITLE
Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington
AUTHOR
Henry Jenkins
PUBLICATION
Always Black
YEAR
2005
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
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, with 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 New York 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.
TOPICS MENTIONED
Violence