Pop Culture Panics

How Moral Crusaders Construct Meanings of Deviance and Delinquency

Karen Sternheimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317751335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Moral panics reveal much about a society's social structure and the sociology embedded in everyday life. This short text examines extreme reactions to American popular culture over the past century, including crusades against comic books, music, and pinball machines, to help convey the "sociological imagination" to undergraduates. Sternheimer creates a critical lens through which to view current and future attempts of modern-day moral crusaders, who try to convince us that simple solutions—like regulating popular culture—are the answer to complex social problems. Pop Culture Panics is ideal for use in undergraduate social problems, social deviance, and popular culture courses.

1
POP CULTURE CRUSADERS

Constructing Meanings of Deviance and Delinquency

Around lunchtime on April 20, 1999, two students at a Colorado high school carried out a planned attack. Heavily armed, they opened fire on classmates in the school’s cafeteria and library. Breaking news coverage broadcast the frenzied scene to the nation and the world. Sobbing students ran from the school, as others were carried out on gurneys, bloodied from the events inside. How many students were injured? Were there more suspects at large? When would the violence end—at Columbine High School that day and around the country more generally?

On that day, two students killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher before killing themselves.

Frightened parents throughout the country wondered whether their children were safe at school, and wanted reassurance that this couldn’t happen to their children. Politicians promised that they would do something. Commentators looked for sources of blame for the seemingly unexplainable: how could two boys from an affluent neighborhood, attending what appeared to be an excellent school, do something so evil?

Popular culture, particularly first-person shooter video games, quickly became a central explanation for the event. In a Gallup Poll conducted the next day, 49 percent of respondents thought violent media contributed to the problem, and 52 percent thought “stricter regulation” of media content was the answer.¹ “Violent Video Was Just a Dress Rehearsal,” said a New York Post headline, noting that the two gunmen were “obsessed with violent video games.”² An article on the front page of the New York Times the same day noted the specific games that the shooters enjoyed.³ For many observers troubled by the content of violent games, it seemed reasonable that video games could have played a role. After all, the graphics within the games had become far more realistic than when video game technology first became popular in the 1970s, and sales had more than doubled between 1995 and 2000, according to one estimate.⁴ The violent games encouraged players to shoot and kill characters; would this teach young kids that it is okay, even pleasurable to shoot others?

Media coverage zeroed in on the video game explanation; magazines, newspapers, and cable news repeatedly mentioned video games in stories about the shootings.⁵ With millions of young gamers, some wondered whether school shootings could become as common as a schoolyard brawl, which seemed a nostalgic throwback to simpler times. Were 1990s teens completely out of control, so awash in violent media that they had no sense of right and wrong? What could be done to stop teens before they kill again?

Talk of Congressional hearings and further regulation followed; something must be done, proponents argued, to prevent the next Columbine. In response, grieving family members filed lawsuits against video game makers, schools installed high-tech security systems, and “zero tolerance” policies were put in place around the country. Problem solved?

Despite emotional claims that video games were causing teens to kill their peers nationwide, youth violence rates had actually dropped during the 1990s; school shootings had declined as well.⁶ There was no new wave of killing among youth in the 1990s or in the 2000s, as youth violence rates continued to decline and have remained flat. Video games were not causing a violence epidemic, because the tragic incident that took place at Columbine High School that day in 1999 was an anomaly, not the new normal.

Complaints about video games are part of a long history of suspicion about how young people spend their leisure time. As we will see throughout this book, in the past people had similar concerns about movies, comic books, pinball machines, and music—so much so that at one point police censored movies, cities banned pinball machines, Congress pondered regulating comic books, and groups burned books and records. All have been blamed for somehow damaging children’s and teens’ moral compass, as critics continually worry about the next generation based on their pastime of choice.

This book explores how and why activists have waged campaigns against popular culture throughout recent American history, and how this process shapes the way we think about both deviance and juvenile delinquency. This chapter uses fears of video games and youth violence as a contemporary example in order to address the central questions of this book:

• Why has popular culture historically been a site of struggle and concern?
• What are moral panics, how are they created, and why do they happen?
• What are moral crusaders and moral entrepreneurs? What do they stand to gain from crusades against popular culture?
• What are folk devils? How and why do moral crusaders create them? How does the creation of folk devils shape meanings of deviance?
• What is the importance of timing and context in anti-popular culture crusades? How is the timing of these crusades related to growing concerns about juvenile delinquency?

In several of my previous books, I explored the disproportional fears of both media and youth. In this book, I focus on the campaigns against media more generally, looking closely at who leads them and why. The answers go well beyond the content of popular culture itself.

Concerns About Popular Culture

The term “popular culture” is used so regularly it is often taken for granted. Is popular culture different from other forms of culture? The problem in defining popular culture is that it is rooted in what people think about the culture being categorized as popular, and it has no clear singular definition.⁷ Yet popular culture has historically been seen as problematic, partly for its content and partly in defining its audience. A discussion of competing theories of popular culture is far beyond the scope of this book; what follows is a very brief overview.

Within sociology, there has been a long-running debate between the notions of “high culture” and what has at times been called “mass culture.” High culture has traditionally been defined as the bastion of the elites and connotes the high status of its participants. Today, we might view classical music, opera, ballet, and some forms of theater and art as forms of culture regarded as having high artistic merit, and predominantly enjoyed by those with wealth, status, and power rather than “the masses.”

In contrast, mass culture, more often today called popular culture, would include forms of entertainment that are created for a large audience, primarily for profit, and enjoyed by a wider, perhaps less discriminating audience. While “high culture” might be considered enriching, educational, and aesthetically important, popular culture has been dismissed as unimportant, vulgar, and even dangerous, especially since some have feared that “mass” audiences are not savvy consumers of culture and will thoughtlessly adopt the messages in the forms of popular culture they consume.⁸ Sociologist Paul Lopes describes how critics of popular culture often create “cultural hierarchies” to condemn and attempt to restrict content they see as troublesome.⁹ Many of the arguments about the dangers of popular culture claim it is harmful to young people, and should be censored, eliminated, or sanitized to protect children.

However, the distinction between the two is problematic: high culture can become popular culture and vice versa. The so-called elites might enjoy forms of popular culture and non-elite people might like forms of “high culture.” The two might merge and thus become indistinguishable. And as scholars in sociology and other disciplines such as cultural studies have observed, popular culture is not simply meaningless drivel, but is a central part of how groups and individuals construct meanings of their social worlds.

Sociologist Herbert Gans challenges the usefulness of these categories, and refutes long-held belief that popular culture is a danger to the broader culture and a threat to those who enjoy it. He challenges the notion that the public is somehow victimized by popular culture, and argues “against the idea that only the cultural expert knows what is good for people and for society.” Gans also discusses that culture can create conflict. “In heterogeneous societies, the struggles between diverse groups and aggregates over the allocation of resources and power are not limited to strictly economic and political issues, but also extend to cultural ones.”¹⁰

We see these struggles play out in concerns about video games and other forms of popular culture. Rather than just about the content of video games—which is certainly worth criticizing sometimes—the struggles over popular culture have more to do with who its participants are, their social status, as well as the status and power of their critics. Video game players are presumed to be young, thought to be easily manipulated by the games’ content, prone to violence, and considered a threat for this reason.

Bolstered by a number of Supreme Court decisions supporting First Amendment rights, as well as market conditions increasing competition for consumers, the subject matter of popular culture expanded during the twentieth century. Bans and restrictions of media content relaxed, upholding freedom of expression and offering much for moral crusaders to campaign against, as movies, music, books, games, and other media no longer had to conform to narrow standards of respectability. Over the course of the century, content became less sanitized, and popular culture offered increasingly explicit depictions of sexuality, violence, and other controversial topics.

The technological changes of the twentieth century played a role in concerns about popular culture. Since the beginning of the century, media consumption has shifted from the public sphere with movies to being increasingly private and segmented, making it more difficult to monitor and control. With each form of new media came new worries that they would bring harm, that vulnerable populations would learn the wrong values in an ever-enticing media environment. This shift has made content more niche-specific and less targeted to a general audience, leading to distinct “taste communities” often demarcated by age, and perhaps less appealing to adults and others in positions of authority. Critics of video games, particularly those who believed that they could lead to real violence by consumers, were likely a generation or two removed from playing them. The greater distance from a form of popular culture, the easier it is to fear it and its consumers.

What Are Moral Panics?

The 1990s school shootings led to a moral panic about video games. A moral panic is a widespread fear that arises which is dramatically out of proportion with the actual threat. The fear is often accompanied by emotional demands that something be done to stop it in order to preserve the basic morals of a society. According to sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a moral panic is a: “strong, widespread (although not necessarily universal) fear or concern that evil doings are afoot, that certain enemies of society are trying to harm some or all of the rest of us.”¹¹

First explored in depth by Cohen in his study of disproportional fears of youth violence in a seaside British resort during 1964, Cohen describes how moral panics are about more than the feared events themselves, but about concerns about a “spreading social disease” that seem to be a “sign of the times.”¹² Likewise, concerns about video games took on a sense of urgency and moral outrage: did games makers manufacture a product that portrayed murder in a positive light? Would the games teach its players to kill and eventually harm others, much like a communicable disease?

While a panic is a highly emotional overreaction, a moral panic has a component of righteousness, framing the issue as a battle between good and evil. A rampage shooting, where young people are killed en masse at school, is easily seen as an evil, immoral act, and concerns about video games centered around claims that these games harmed the moral judgment of impressionable young people. Moral panics focus on people, groups, or things that seem to threaten the very moral fiber of society.

Moral panics aren’t only about popular culture, of course. Panics about communist threats, immigrants, and the Japanese Americans during World War II are all examples of disproportional and widespread fears that emerged in history. Goode and Ben Yehuda describe panics about witchcraft in European history, drug scares in the United States and in Israel, as well as fears of “sexual psychopaths” in the mid-twentieth century.¹³ Others have examined moral panics in the US and Britain focusing on child sexual abuse, satanic rituals, welfare abusers, random violence, gangs, pornography, HIV/AIDS, ecstasy, and raves.¹⁴

These examples highlight that moral panics aren’t necessarily completely made-up issues; to call something a moral panic is not to deny that something exists. While no evidence supports the fear that Japanese Americans were plotting against the US government during World War II, gang violence does exist, some children are sexually abused, there are people who misuse welfare, and some people are victims of random violence. Concerns about popular culture don’t happen in a vacuum. Rates of youth violence did rise between the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading activists and politicians to look for possible causes and sources of control in order to reduce future threats. Video games did become more popular in the 1990s, with graphics becoming more realistic and more ubiquitous with the advent of online gaming.

But moral panics around these issues exaggerate the frequency and manner of the problem. For instance, Mary de Young writes about panics surrounding daycare centers in the US in the 1980s, where hundreds of children were allegedly sexually abused. The snowball effect of media coverage placed more and more daycare centers un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Pop Culture Crusaders: Constructing Meanings of Deviance and Delinquency
• Chapter 2 Anti-Movie Crusades: Fears of Immigration, Urbanization, and Shifts in Childhood
• Chapter 3 Anti-Pinball Crusades: Fears of Gambling and Free Time
• Chapter 4 Anti-Comic Book Crusades: Fear of Youth Violence
• Chapter 5 Anti-Music Crusades: Fears of Racial Integration, Religious Participation, and Freedom of Expression
• Chapter 6 Conclusion: Contemporary Pop Culture Crusades
• Selected Bibliography
• Index