ABSTRACT
Everybody knows that media cause violence, right? News reports frequently tell us what “studies show,” and such quantitative studies often find that violent content in television, movies, and video games is associated with a higher level of aggression in viewers. Because these findings circulate so widely in popular magazines and news programs, many policymakers and parents act as if the link between media violence and real violence were a proven fact. In your introductory media studies class, you are likely to hear a dif-
ferent depiction of the media. Media studies scholars tend to emphasize the complexity of media and the complicated ways that even ordinary viewers make meanings from them. To think of media as having straightforward “effects” is to do violence to the intricate interaction between films/television/games and their audiences. A media studies class slows down this interactive process, expanding and elaborating on the ways we interpret media every day. Contemporary media scholars (particularly those in the humanities) usually favor ideas about how active audiences engage with media, instead of thinking of how a more passive audience reacts to media. College students taking required introductory classes in both the
social sciences and the humanities can feel like they are being indoctrinated into two different “religions” (Catholicism and Judaism, for instance). You recognize that the two religions are searching for similar things, but they are approaching matters in entirely different ways and they place their faith in very different gods. The word “faith” feels like the right word here because both quantitative and qualitative researchers have core beliefs that are essentially unprovable. Quantitative scholars believe that numbers can provide a usefully clear summary of the world. Qualitative researchers place their faith in the capacity of words to capture the world’s nuances. Both approaches have advantages and both have shortcomings.
