Entertainment, Public, Mayhem, Violence

Mayhem: Violence As Public Entertainment

What is the effect of long-term exposure to media violence on our national character? While almost everyone has a strong opinion on this question, it is usually seen as a hopeless standoff between the threat of censorship and the threat of disintegrating public morality. In Mayhem, Sissela Bok brilliantly reframes the issue, showing that we need not feel so helpless.

As in Lying and Secrets, she puts the question in clarifying perspective and reveals how our ways of dealing with it not only express but also shape our character and lives.Does watching violent acts make us violent? As Western society becomes ever more media-saturated, this question continues to provoke heated debate. On one side are those who seek to reduce the role of violence in popular entertainment, and on the other are the defenders of free speech and civil liberties. Sissela Bok's Mayhem is an attempt to assess the impact of violent entertainment and to provide strategies for reducing that impact. Her study is grounded in a historical examination of violence in entertainment--from the Roman gladiators through Renaissance theater to the current attempts to regulate the Internet. By placing the current debate in a historical context, she is able to dig beneath the hysteria of the present and find the deeper roots of our fascination.

In exploring the modern role of violence as public entertainment, Bok pursues the middle ground, refusing to advocate outright censorship, but also reluctant to simply deny that there is a problem. One of her solutions is to increase "media literacy"--helping children "...learn to take a more active and self-protective part in evaluating what they see." This seems to be an eminently sensible response, protecting freedom of speech while interrogating the place of violence in our lives. It is not the violent entertainment itself that is dangerous, but its passive consumption by an unquestioning audience.

This is a dauntingly complex issue, and Bok cannot offer easy answers or hope to please all her readers, but this is a thoroughly researched and compellingly stated contribution to an extremely important debate.









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