What Does Watching TV Make You Do?

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Term Paper Title	What Does Watching TV Make You Do?
# of Words	1079
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.32

What does watching TV make you do?

Since we live in a violent society, we're constantly hearing arguments that seeing TV violence,
particularly as kids, desensitises us so we accept real violence more off handedly maybe it even
triggers real violence.

But TV also shows lots of hugging. The standard plot for most family sitcoms is;
(1) Problem causes family members to get mad at one another;
(2) Family members abuse each other in cute ways,
(3) All is forgiven by end of show and everybody hugs.

So television gives us a conflicting set of images: violence and hugging. Every popular medium has
undergone the charge that it corrupts youth. The novel was attacked, then movies, radio, comics,
rock and roll, and now TV, music videos, and rap.

The theory behind the attacks is always the same: if Johnny commits a crime, he's not responsible
and his parents are not responsible: Something Else is responsible. The problem in this society isn't
the easy availability of drugs, or guns, or pornography, or television, although all are scape goateed.

All are mere inanimate things: they do only what we have them do. All supposedly scientific studies
on the subject of TV violence "causing" real violence are based on a theory of cause-and-effect that
is contrary to humans having the capability of making responsible, moral choices. But we are
volitional beings by nature: we choose what we do and what we make ourselves. You take two
brothers from an identical lousy environment missing father, overworked mother, no money, rotten
inner city neighbourhood.

One brother joins a gang and has committed his first murder within a couple of years. The other
brother hides out from the gangs at the public library and learns to read out of boredom. Because of
reading he manages to stay in school and takes a fast-food job while attending night college. Even if
you postulate a deterministic model of human behaviour, comparing two specific phenomena in
isolation tells us nothing useful.

How can you isolate one specific set of television images from the effects of the other available
images? Further, how do you go inside the skulls of the people doing acts of violence and find out
the actual causes, when even asking won't give you a sure answer?

Serial killer Ted Bundy claimed in a final death-row interview that reading pornography made him do
it. But how did that screwed up psyche know what was cause and what was effect? It's just as likely
that the same impulses that attracted him to ...

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