Congressional Testimony on Media Violence

by Henry Jenkins

16,204 words
posted: june 16, 1999

[This is the text of testimony presented before the U.S. Senate

Commerce Committee , Washington, D.C., May 4, 1999.]

I am the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program

and a Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. I hold a Masters in Communication Studies from
the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For the past
seventeen years, I have made the study of American popular
culture the central focus of my teaching and research. To
date, I have published six books and more than fifty essays on
various questions concerning the aesthetic, social, and cultural
impact of popular culture. My first book, Textual Poachers:
Television Fans and Participatory Culture, focused on the
subculture of media fans and their particular investments in
and creative reworking of the contents of popular culture. [1]
My two most recent books, The Children's Culture Reader and
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games
deal centrally with the questions that are before this
committee. [2] I am now doing initial research for a study of
the ways that digital media are shifting our relationships with
popular culture, a project that will particularly focus on the
experience of children and youth in a "hypermediated culture."

Many of the others testifying on this panel come from

traditions of experimental or quantitative research into "media
effects." I represent a different tradition in media studies which
employs more "qualitative" methods, including those derived
from anthropology, history, and literary analysis. My research
seeks to address the meanings that get attached to cultural
symbols and the ways that people in specific social and
cultural contexts interact with media. I am taking the time to
spell out these different approaches to research because they
shape how various witnesses on this panel think about media
and also shape what kinds of "evidence" or "findings" they
present. In this extended statement, I will outline some of the
ways this research can contribute to our understanding of the
relationship between popular culture and youth violence.

My testimony before this committee also draws on more

personal experiences. I am the father of a high school senior
whose engagement with and insights about popular culture
and digital media have contributed tremendously to my
understanding of the relationship of American teens to our
changing media environment. Moreover, I have served for the
last four years as the housemaster of Senior House, an MIT
dormitory, which brings into close daily contact with 150 young
people, including a fair share of "goths" and "computer nerds."
The Littleton shootings have been a major focus of discussion
within the dorm in recent weeks and their thoughts and
reactions have played a central role in helping me understand
what is at stake for adolescents in the context of our current
"moral panic" over violent media. [For a sample of their
reactions to the incident, see [Appendix A] Whatever policy
decisions emerge from these hearings, we are going to be
most effective in confronting the root causes of yout h violence
if we seriously attempt to understand contemporary popular
culture and why it is meaningful to the youth who consume it.
This understanding is going to come from listening to and
taking seriously what young people have to say.

The shootings at Colombine High School in Littleton, Colorado

several weeks ago have justly sparked a period of national
soul searching. This incident was shocking and tragic; it
seems to defy any rational understanding. As parents,
educators, citizens, political leaders, we demand to know how
such a thing could have happened and we desperately want to
believe we can come up with policies or laws that can prevent
it from happening again. We want ANSWERS. But we are only
going to come up with valid answers if we start by asking the
right sets of QUESTIONS. So far, most of the conversation
about Littleton has reflected a desire to understand what the
media are doing to our children. Instead, we should be
focusing our attention on understanding what our children are
doing with media.

As more information becomes available to us, it is becoming

increasingly clear that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two
Littleton shooters, had an especially complex relationship to
popular culture. Various pundits have pointed their fingers at
video games, violent movies, television series, popular music,
 comic books, websites, youth subcultures, and fashion
choices to locate the cause of their violent behavior. [3] . What
have we learned so far? Harris and Klebold played video
games. Not surprising -- roughly 80 percent of American boys
play video games. [4] Harris and Klebold spent a great deal of
time on line. According to Don Tapscott's Growing Up Digital:
The Rise of the Net Generation, 11 percent of the world's
computer users are under the age of 15. Thirty six percent of
American teens use an online service at home, 49 percent at
school, and 69 percent have been on-line at least once in their
lifetime, compared to 40% of the total population that has
been on-line. [5] They engaged in on-line gaming. According
to Jon Katz, estimates of online gamers in the United States
alone run as high as 15 to 20 million people. [6] Harris and
Klebold watched a range of films, including The Matrix, which
has been the top money earner in four of the last five weeks.
They listened to various popular music groups, some relatively
obscure (kmfdm), some highly successful (Marilyn Manson).
They may have borrowed certain iconography from the Goth
subculture, a subculture that has a history going back to the
1980s and which has rarely been associated with violence or
criminal activity. They may have worn black trench coats.
None of these cultural choices, taken individually or as an
aggregate, differentiates Harris and Klebold from a sizable
number of American teenagers who also consumed these
same forms of popular culture but have not gone out and
gunned down their classmates. The tangled relationship
between these various f orms of popular culture makes it
impossible for us to determine a single cause for their actions.
Culture doesn't work that way.

Cultural artifacts are not simple chemical agents like

carcinogens that produce predictable results upon those who
consume them. They are complex bundles of often
contradictory meanings that can yield an enormous range of
different responses from the people who consume them.

Like the rest of us, Harris and Klebold inhabited a

hypermediated culture. The range of media options available
to us has expanded at a dramatic rate over the past several
decades. We see this expansion everywhere -- the
introduction of CDs led to an expansion of the range of popular
music kept in circulation; the introduction of cable television
has dramatically increased the spectrum of television
programs we can watch; the introduction of digital media
introduces us to a much broader array of ideas and stories that
we would have encountered in a world of centralized
gatekeepers; niche marketing has led to an explosion of new
specialized magazines, many of them targeting youth. New
media technologies are being introduced at an astonishing rate
enabling a more participatory relationship to media culture. In
such a world, each of us make choices about what kinds of
media we want to consume, what kinds of culture are
meaningful or emotionally rewarding to us. None of us devote
our attention exclusively to onl y one program, only one
recording star, only one network, or only one medium. People
define their own media environment through their own
particular choices from the huge menu of cultural artifacts and
channels of communication that surround us all the time.
Some teens are drawn towards the angst-ridden lyrics of
industrial music; others are happily jitterbugging to neo-swing.
Selling popular culture to our kids isn't quite the same thing as
selling cigarettes to our kids. When it comes to popular culture,
we all "roll our own." We cobble together a personal
mythology of symbols, images, and stories that we have
adopted from the raw materials given us by the mass media,
and we invest in those symbols and stories meanings that are
personal to us or that reflect our shared experiences as part of
one or another subcultural community. In the case of Harris
and Klebold, they drew into their world the darkest, most
alienated, most brutal images available to them and they
turned those images into the vehicle of t heir personal demons,
their antisocial impulses, their psychological maladjustment,
their desire to hurt those who have hurt them.

In this case, those choices and investments had lethal results.

Banning black trenchcoats or violent video games doesn't get

us anywhere. The black trench coats or the song lyrics are
only symbols. To be effective in changing the nature of
contemporary youth culture, what we want to get at are the
meanings that are associated with those symbols, the kinds of
affiliations they express, and more importantly, the feelings of
profound alienation and powerlessness that pushed these
particular kids (and others like them) over the edge.
Consuming popular culture didn't make these boys into killers;
rather, the ways they consumed popular culture reflected their
drive towards destruction. For most kids most of the time,
these forms of popular culture provide a normal, if sometimes
angst-ridden, release of frustration and tension. Sometimes,
indeed most often, as the old joke goes, a cigar is only a cigar
and a black trenchcoat is only a raincoat.

Symbols don't necessary have fixed or universal meanings.

Symbols gain meanings through their use and circulation
across a variety of contexts. Some of those meanings are
shared, some of them are deeply personal and private, but
once we perceive a need to express a particular feeling or
idea, human beings are pretty resourceful at locating a symbol
that suits their needs.

It is relatively easy to get rid of one or another symbol. Some

symbols -- the swastika for example --maintain power over
thousands of years, although they have often radically shifted
meaning over that time. But most of the time, symbols have a
very limited shelf life. Half the time media activists focus their
energies on combating examples of popular culture that have
little or no commercial appeal to begin with. Computer games
such as Custer's Revenge, Death Trap, or Postal , which have
been the center of so much debate about video game violence
had only limited commercial success and are far from the
bread and butter of the video game industry, which is, for the
most part, far more dependent on its sports-focused games
than on combat games. The images found in such marginal
works are certainly outrageous, but they are so outrageous
that they attract few customers; they alienate their potential
market and collapse of their own accord. It is much harder to
get rid of the feelings that those symbols express.

I don't need to remind you how many violent crimes have been
inspired by one or another passage from the Bible. When we
hear such stories about religious fanatics committing violent
crimes, we recognize that reading the Bible did not cause
these murders, even though some of the violent images that
got stuck in the killers' minds originated in one or another
passage of scripture. When we encounter such situations, we
say that these criminal actions resulted from a misreading of
the Bible, that they took those images out of context, that the
killers invested those passages with their own sickness. The
same claim can be made about the works of popular culture.
Popular films and television programs may not have the
spiritual depth of the Bible, they will almost certainly not
survive as long, but they are still complex works that express
many different ideas and lend themselves to many different
uses and interpretations. Sometimes one or another image
from mass culture does become part of the fantasy universe
of a psychotic, does seem to inspire some of their antisocial
behavior, but we need to recognize that these images have
also been taken out of context, that they have been ascribed
with idiosyncratic meanings. Despite the mass size of the
audience for some of the cultural products we are discussing,
there are tremendous differences in the way various audience
members respond to their influence.

Shortly after I learned about the Colombine High School

shootings, I received e-mail from a 16-year-old web mistress
who had written to thank me about some comments I made in
an interview on media fandom. She gave me the URL for her
website and what I found there was truly inspirational. She had
produced an enormous array of poems and short stories
drawing on characters from one or another popular television
series, film, or comic book series. She had organized her
friends -- both in her local community and elsewhere in the
country -- to write their own stories and poems. Most of them
showed a careful crafting and an expressive quality that most
high school composition teachers would love to foster in their
students. She had made her own selections from the range of
popular culture aimed at American youth. For example, she
was especially drawn towards more realistic stories dealing
with the social relations between teens, to such television
series as My So-Called Life, Dawson's Creek, Beverley Hills
90210, and Party of Five, but she was also drawn towards
some series that have Gothic overtones, such as Buffy the
Vampire Slayer or Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comic books.
She reached into contemporary youth culture and found there
images that emphasized the power of friendship, the
importance of community, the wonder of first romance. She
used the web to create a space where she and other teens
could share what they had created with each other. The mass
media didn't make Harris and Klebold violent and destructive
any more than it made this girl creative and sociable. These
teens drew on the stories that circulate within popular culture
as resources for expressing things that were within them.
These teens used media as a tool for communicating their
perceptions of the world. Their websites look very different
because they are very different teens. Even when they are
using some of the same images, they don't mean the same
things to them.

Mass media is a notoriously blunt instrument. It doesn't do a

very good job of catering to our individual tastes and needs.
We don't always subscribe to all of the values contained within
 a particular mass-produced narrative. Even when we are
passionate about a particular program or CD, it's pretty likely
there will be aspects that frustrate, disappoint, annoy, or even
actively offend us. I've observed in my research on media
fandom that fan activity is born of a mixture of fascination and
frustration. We are drawn to a particular media artifact
because it seems to be the best available vehicle for exploring
some issue that is deeply important to us, because it
entertains us or provides us with pleasure in a way that most
other available choices in the marketplace do not. If they did
not fascinate us on some level, we would not devote so much
of our attention and energy to them. But, if they did not
frustrate us on some level, we would also not spend much
time scrutinizing, critiquing, and rewriting them. Th ese media
artifacts don't fully meet our needs and so we're pushed
towards a more intense and often a more critical engagement
with them. We want to rewrite them to more perfectly reflect
our own desires and fantasies. And these competing feelings
of fascination and frustration give rise to the fan websites that
are becoming increasingly common on the web.

It is very hard to tell what these artifacts and myths mean from
a position outside the cultural community that has grown up
around them. All we can see are the symbols; we can't really
get at the meanings that are attached to them without opening
some kind of conversation with the people who are using
those symbols, who are consuming those stories, and who are
deploying those media.

For methodological reasons, empirical research on "media

effects" chooses not to address any of these issues, tending to
bracket from consideration issues about media content,
context, and form as beyond its purview. Empirical
researchers can only work with simple variables.
Consequently, they offer only crude insights into the actual
consequences of consuming violent media within specific real
world contexts. They can tell us that certain media images
stimulate neural responses, creating a state of tension or
arousal. They can measure certain attitude shifts after
consuming media images. But, in both cases, it takes a series
of interpretive leaps and speculations to move from such data
to any meaningful claim that media images causes real world
behavior. Most "media effects" researchers pull back from
making any confident claims about the possible links between
popular culture and youth violence, because decades of
research on media violence still yields contradictory and
confusing results.

Media effects research typically starts from the assumption

that we know what we mean by "media violence," that we can
identify and count violent acts when we see them, that we can
choose or construct a representative example of media
violence and use it as the basis for a series of controlled
experiments. Under most circumstances, our children don't
experience violent images abstracted from social or narrative
contexts. Exposing children to such concentrated doses of
decontextualize violence focuses their attention on the violent
acts and changes the emotional tone which surrounds them.
Storytelling depends upon the construction of conflict and in
visual based media, conflict is often rendered visible by being
staged through violence. Stories help to ascribe meaning to
the violent acts they depict. When we hear a list of the sheer
number of violent acts contained on an evening of American
television, it feels overwhelming. But, each of these acts
occurs in some kind of a context and we need to be attentive
to the specifics of those various contexts. When Leonardo
diCaprio's character kills himself at the end of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it means something
different than when his character fantasizes about anti-social
violence in The Basketball Diaries. Some works depict
violence in order to challenge the culture that generates that
violence; other works celebrate violence as an appropriate
response to social humiliation or as a tool for restoring order in
a violent and chaotic culture or as a vehicle of patriotism.
Some works depict self-defense; others acts of aggression.
Some make distinctions between morally justifiable and
morally unjustifiable violence; some don't. We know this, of
course, because we are all consumers of violent images. We
read murder mysteries; we watch news reports; we enjoy war
movies and westerns; we go to operas and read classic works
of western literature. So many of the films, for example, which
have been at the center of debates about media violence -- A
Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, The
Basketball Diaries, and now The Matrix -- are works that have
provoked enormous critical debates because of their thematic
and aesthetic complexity, because they seem to be trying to
say something different about our contemporary social
environment and they seem to be finding new images and new
techniques for communicating their meanings. Depicting
violence is certainly not the same thing as promoting violence.
Cultural studies research tells us we need to make meaningful
distinctions between different ways of representing violence,
different kinds of stories about violence, and different kinds of
relationships to violent imagery. [7]

Media effects research often makes little or no distinction

between the different artistic conventions we use to represent
violent acts. At its worst, media effects research makes no
distinction between violent cartoons or video games that offer
a fairly stylized representation of the world around us and
representation of violence that are more realistic. Other
researchers, however, show that children learn at an early age
to make meaningful distinctions between different kinds of
relationships between media images and the realm of their
own lived experience. [8] These studies suggest that children
are fairly adept at dismissing works that represent fantastic,
hyperbolic, or stylized violence and are more likely to be
emotionally disturbed by works that represent realistic violence
and especially images of violence in documentary films
(predator-prey documentaries, war films) that can not be
divorced from their real world referents. Such research would
suggest that children are more lik ely to be disturbed by reports
of violent crimes on the evening news than representations of
violence in fictional works.

One of the most significant aspects of play is that play is

divorced from real life. Play exists in a realm of fantasy that
strips our actions of their everyday consequences or
meanings. Classic studies of play behavior among primates,
for example, suggest that apes make basic distinctions
between play fighting and actual combat. In some
circumstances, they seem to take pleasure wrestling and
tousling with each other and in other contexts, they might rip
each other apart in mortal combat. [9] We do things in our
fantasies that we would have no desire to do in real life, and
this is especially true of fantasies that involve acts of violence.
[10] The pleasure of play stems at least in part from escapism.
The appeal of video game violence often has more to do with
feelings of empowerment than with the expression of
aggressive or hurtful feelings. Our children feel put down by
teachers and administrators, by kids on the playground; they
feel like they occupy a very small space in the world and have
very limited ability to shape reality according to their needs
and desires. Playing video games allows them to play with
power, to manipulate reality, to construct a world through their
fantasies in which they are powerful and can exert control. The
pleasure stems precisely from their recognition of the contrast
between the media representations and the real world. It is not
the case that media violence teaches children that real world
violence has no consequence. Rather, children can take
pleasure in playing with power precisely because they are
occupying a fantastic space that has little or no direct
relationship to their own everyday environment. Fantasy
allows children to express feelings and impulses that have to
be carefully held in check in their real world interactions. Such
experiences can be cathartic, can enable a release of tension
that allows children to better cope with their more mundane
frustrations. [11] The stylized and hyperbolic quality o f most
contemporary entertainment becomes one of the primary
markers by which children distinguish between realistic and
playful representations of violence.

Let us be clear: while I am questioning both the methodology

and the conclusions employed by a central tradition of media
effects research, I am not arguing that children learn nothing
from the many hours they spend consuming media; I am not
arguing that the content of our culture makes no difference in
the shape of our thoughts and our feelings. Quite the opposite.
Of course, we should be concerned about the content of our
culture; we should be worried if violent images push away
other kinds of representations of the world. The meanings
youths weave into their culture are at least partially a product
of the kinds of fantasy materials they have access to and
therefore we should subject those materials to scrutiny. We
should encourage children to engage critically with the
materials of their culture. But, popular culture is only one
influence on our children's fantasy lives. As the Littleton case
suggests, the most powerful influences on children are those
they experience directly, that are part of their imm ediate
environment at school or at home. In the case of Harris and
Klebold, these influences apparently included a series of social
rejections and humiliations and a perception that adult
authorities weren't going to step in and provide them with
protection from the abuse directed against them from the "in
crowd."

We can turn off a television program or shut down a video

game if we find what it is showing us ugly, hurtful, or
displeasing. We can't shut out the people in our immediate
environment quite so easily. Many teenagers find going to
school a brutalizing experience of being required to return day
after day to a place where they are ridiculed and taunted and
 sometimes physically abused by their classmates and where
school administrators are slow to respond to their distress and
can offer them few strategies for making the abuse stop.
Media images may have given Harris and Klebold symbols to
express their rage and frustration, but the media did not create
the rage or generate their alienation. What sparked the
violence was not something they saw on the internet or on
television, not some song lyric or some sequence from a
movie, but things that really happened to them. When we
listen to young people talk about the shootings, they
immediately focus on the pain, suffering, and loneliness
experienced by Harris and Klebold, seeing something of their
own experiences in the media descriptions of these troubled
youths, and struggling to understand the complex range of
factors which insure that they are going to turn out okay while
the Colorado adolescents ended up dead. [Appendix A] If we
want to do something about the problem, we are better off
focusing our attention on negative social experiences and not
the symbols we use to talk about those experiences.

Some of the experts who have stepped forward in the wake of

the Littleton shootings have accused mass media of teaching
our children how to perform violence --as if such a direct
transferal of knowledge were possible. The metaphor of media
as a teacher is a compelling but ultimately misleading one. As
a teacher, I would love to be able to decide exactly what I want
my students to know and transmit that information to them with
sufficient skill and precision that every student in the room
learned exactly what I wanted, no more and no less. But, as
teachers across the country can tell you, teaching doesn't
work that way. Each student pays attention to some parts of
the lesson and ignores or forgets others. Each has their own
motivations for learning. Whatever "instruction" occurs in the
media environment is even more unpredictable. Entertainers
don't typically see themselves as teaching lessons. They don't
carefully plan a curriculum. They don't try to clear away other
distractions. Consumers don't sit down in front of their
television screens to learn a lesson. Their attention is even
more fragmented; their goals in taking away information from
the media are even more personal; they aren't really going to
be tested on what they learn. Those are all key differences
from the use of video games as a tool of military training and
the use of video games for recreation. The military uses the
games as part of a specific curriculum with clearly defined
goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and
have a clear need for the information and skills being
transmitted, and there are clear consequences for not
mastering those skills. None of this applies to playing these
same or similar games in a domestic or arcade context.

So far, the media response to the Littleton shootings has told

us a great deal more about what those symbols mean to adults
than what they mean to American youth, because for the most
part, it is the adults who are doing all of the talking and the
youth who are being forced to listen. Three key factors have
contributed to the current media fixation on the role of popular
culture in the shootings:

1. Adult fears of adolescents and their culture.

Tremendous emotion surrounds the transition from
child to adult. The teens struggle with issues of
autonomy, the adult with issues of mortality. For
thousands of years, our mythology has told stories of
adults who cast out their own children because they
fear that they will kill them and take their place. What
those stories express is an age-old process of transition
between generations. Teenagers want to break free
from their parents earlier, on average, than parents
want to turn loose of their children, but the tug-of-war
between those impulses is central to the process of
coming of age within our culture. Popular culture has
increasingly become a vehicle for the complex feelings
surrounding this key transitional point in the human life
cycle. Teenagers are drawn towards popular culture as
a means of defining their self identities (seeing cultural
symbols as vehicles of self expression and
individualization) and their relationship to their peer
culture ( seeing cultural symbols as means of signaling
their affiliation with others who share their tastes,
experiences, values, or interests). The Black
trenchcoats associated with the Littleton shooting
function on both levels, signaling the wearer's refusal to
conform to certain modes of dress sanctioned by adult
authorities and preferred by the "in crowd" and
expressing membership in an alternative social
community, however small and isolated that group must
have felt.

Adolescents often choose symbols to demark the

differences between their generation and those who
came before, whether those symbols are the zoot suits
of the 1940s, the duck tails of the 1950s, the love
beads of the 1960s, or the goth garb of the 1990s. As
part of that process, youth are often attracted to images
that are "shocking" or "offensive" to their parents. When
we look at such symbols, we often find that their most
important content is the repudiation of adult tastes. In
the 1970s, British punks used the swastika as a
symbol, not because they embraced Nazism, but
because they knew this symbol was so powerfully
offensive to a generation of adults who came of age
during World War II. [12] The same can be said about
the supernatural or death-related imagery associated
with the goth subculture.

I asked a 24 year old graduate student who had a long

history of close involvement with the goth movement
what I should tell this committee about the goths. Her
response speaks for itself:

In high school, before there was even the

label 'goth', some of the disenfranchised
youth started to hang out together to give
ourselves a safe place to be depressed.
Really, that is how I remember it. We
were all fed up with not fitting in, not
being happy, not being athletic, and so
forth, and EXTREMELY fed up with being
picked on by those who were. So, we
started to band together as a support
group. Left to ourselves, we listened to
depressing music, watched depressing
movies, and generally moped about. We
also started wearing black, which at the
time was mostly to distinguish ourselves
from the normals of the school (the 80's
were a very pastel decade) than to make
a real statement.

Over the years, 'goth' has evolved into a

much more coherent genre. It has its own
dance clubs, record labels, bands,
fashion sense and required reading list.
But it's still basically about the same
thing. People want a safe space to
explore the more depressing aspects of
the world they live in. They don't want to
feel guilty for not being happy all the
time, they don't want to be told to get on
Prozac, and they don't want to force
themselves to put on masks for the
benefit of the people around them.

Goths, in my experience, are more into

exploring their own pain than inflicting
any on other people. They would rather
sit in the dark and contemplate their own
misery than set about trying to hurt
anyone else. I know that sounds like a
horrible generalization, but as far as
being goth is concerned it is much nobler
to glory in your own pain than to go out
and harm other people because you're
not happy. The goths I know don't initiate
fights, they don't date rape, they don't
carry guns, they don't pick on others, they
don't force confrontations. They spend a
lot of time complaining that the rest of the
world 'doesn't understand' them, but they
don't really want to go out of their way to
make people understand. They have their
own interests and really just want to be
left to them.

Most people get scared by the symbols

that accompany being Gothic - the black
clothes, candles, ankhs, vampire
symbology and so forth. Most of this, in
the simplest sense, can be attributed to
the Gothic belief that other times and
places were far more gentle and
accepting of the sorrows of life. The ankh
is a badge of being Gothic for many
reasons -it is the Egyptian symbol of life
(a rather positive symbol at that), it
stands for a people who viewed their
entire worldly existence as a stepping
stone to a happier world beyond death.

Which brings up the famous Gothic

fascination with death. Most people don't
realize that, when goths talk or obsess
 over the topic of death, they're talking
about their own final experience on Earth.
The Gothic attitude is that death is our
last ride, and we only get one chance at
it. It is to be revered and a natural part of
being human, not feared and hidden from
view. The Gothic focus on death has
nothing to do with murder or the
experience of others.

Strange aside: I was just on the phone

with my Mother, who was very distressed
when I came home after my first year of
college wearing Gothic fashion and
listening to Gothic music. But after seeing
it in me and my friends and learning
about it, she had this to say. "The people
I'm least afraid of in the world are the
Goth kids. I was afraid of it when you first
started because I thought you'd be going
to wild sex orgies with whips and chains,
and I think most people don't realize that
those things aren't what being Gothic is
about. You guys only wanted to sit
around, watch movies and drink coffee."
(which, incidentally, is pretty much how
my mom spends all of her free time)

Contemporary youth culture appears to many adult

observers to be overwhelmingly dark and pessimistic --
but this is hardly a recent phenomenon. The original
model for the goths were the romantics (such as Lord
Byron or Percy Shelly) and the aesthetics (such as
Oscar Wilde and August Beardsley). In reading
contemporary descriptions of the goths, one is
reminded of the lyrics to a song from Gilbert and
Sullivan's operetta, Patience, which was written as a
spoof of the morbid self-absorption, languid moping,
and loud proclamations of doom and despair
associated with the aesthetic movement. Yet, Gilbert
and Sullivan recognized that most such behaviors and
attitudes were something of sham, a series of poses
and pretenses calculated to establish one's
membership within a subcultural community. Their
comic opera suggests that the aesthetic movement had
embraced a series of symbol that meant something
quite different to them than to those outside their little
circle.

The symbols of adolescent culture often have a certain

hyperbolic quality that reflects the urgency felt by youth
who see their lives undergoing profound and rapid
changes and who need someway of sharing their
uneasiness with the world. Adolescent symbols often
divide the world into extreme blacks and whites, and if
their parents have chosen to define the "white" side,
then they are going to explore the "dark side" on their
own. This does not mean that our children are being
drawn to devil worship and demonology, only that they
are constructing fantasies on a symbolic terrain
designed to contrast as strongly as possible with the
familiar world of their own upbringing. They want to
become themselves and often that means becoming
someone other than their mother or father.

To some degree, all of this is perfectly normal, perfectly

healthy, and all but inevitable. Most kids left to their
own devices find their way back to their parents, accept
their proper place in the adult world, regain some
equilibrium once this process is over. Yet, knowing this
doesn't always make it any easier to cope with
adolescents in your family or in your neighborhood. On
a bad day, the best adolescents can be hurtful and
disrespectful. They call our bluff and reveal our
hypocrisies; they push back too hard sometimes and
we are often unprepared for the blows they deliver onto
us. They aren't always eager to explain things to us and
in fact, they take pleasure in our befuddlement when
confronting their culture. Youth symbols are often
cryptic to adults, making sense only within the context
provided by membership within the youth subculture,
and adults are correct to feel vaguely threatened by
those symbols, since part of what they are expressing
is the desire of youth to define themselves in opposit
ion to their parent's culture.

Yet, the cryptic nature of these symbols often means

adults invest them with all of our worst fears, all of our
own anxieties about the process of our children
breaking away from us and becoming their own
persons. Because we don't understand what these
 symbols mean, we make them mean what we most fear
that they mean. A certain hysteria develops that comes
bubbling to the surface whenever we find an incident
which seems to give some degree of credibility to our
fears. Few of the adult commentators on the shootings
have much direct knowledge of the forms of popular
culture they are discussing; they can only look at the
symbols and make assumptions about what they mean.
We have been given a series of images, ripped from
any meaningful context, and described by "experts"
who are often profoundly ignorant of their place in youth
culture. We are not making even the most gross
distinctions between different youth movements and
their goals, values, contexts, and followings. Harris and
Klebold were initially labeled as goths, though it is
increasingly clear that they had little or no direct
affiliation with this subculture and that their values were
totally opposed to the tolerance of diversity and
pacifism that are central to the goth's definition of
themselves. Such a muddled map of the landscape of
youth culture is not a meaningful basis for forming
social policy. Unless you move beyond such gross
generalizations and deal with these symbols in more
specific contexts, these hearings are more likely to fan
the growing hysteria than to yield any meaningful public
policy.

2. Adult fears of new technologies. According to a survey

in The Washington Post last week, 82 percent of
Americans cite the internet as a potential cause of the
shootings. [13] The internet is no more to blame for the
Columbine shootings than the telephone is to blame for
the Lindbergh Kidnapping. The internet is a channel of
communication just like the telephone; it can be used to
heal or to hurt. What such statistics suggest is the
degree to which adults are anxious about the current
rate of technological change. Writers have noted for
several years now that young people are responding to
the participatory potential of digital media in profoundly
different ways that their parents have. Children are the
fastest growing demographic group on the internet. In
his book, Virtuous Reality, Jon Katz writes: "Children
are at the epicenter of the information revolution,
ground zero of the digital world. They helped build it,
they understand it as well as, or better than, a nyone
else.... Children in the digital age are neither unseen
nor unheard. In fact, they see and hear more than
children ever have. They occupy a new kind of cultural
space. They're citizens of a new order." [14] Their
parents often do not understand the nature of these
new media, do not understand why their children find
these on-line communities so attractive, and do not
understand how their children seem so free and
comfortable navigating digital environments that the
adults find to so terribly intimidating. Our children seem
to be going places where we can not follow them. Even
where adults have direct personal experience with
digital media, there is a fundamental difference in how
you think about the computer depending upon whether,
like most of the adult population, you initially
experienced it as a tool of the workplace or the
classroom or whether, as this younger generation has,
you initially experience it in the context of your
recreational or social life.

Many adults want children to spend time working with

their computers because they see them as necessary
tools for educational and professional development.
There has been an enormous push to wire our
classroom as well as concern about those children
being left behind by the digital revolution, those who
lack access to technologies that can shape their future.
But, many adults also perceive the amount of time
children spend on the computer as a form of addiction
which potentially isolates them from others. To use
Joseph Lieberman's evocative phrase, they perceive
the computer as the "nightmare before Christmas," as a
threat to their relationships with their children and to
their offspring's mental health. These parents and adult
leaders fail to recognize that most of the time their
children are on the computer, they are engaging in a
profoundly social activity. The computer has become a
central point of access to their peer culture. For many
kids, like Harris and Klebold, who feel isolated in their
own schoo ls, who have become outcasts or social
pariahs, going on-line becomes a way of forming
alternative social support networks, of finding someone
out there somewhere who doesn't think you are a gross
geek --even if that person lives on the other side of the
country or the other side of the planet. Yes, our children
can fall into bad company on-line, as they can in real
 life, but the internet has expanded the potential that our
children will be able to find their way into a good and
supportive community because they are not restricted
to the people in their own immediate geographic area.

We thus need to move beyond our technophobic

reactions to unfamiliar media and instead try to develop
a more sophisticated understanding of what our
children are doing when they go on-line. Research on
young people's relationship to digital technology is still
at its early stages and may not yet allow us to make
meaningful generalizations, but it seems clear that
going on-line liberates children from some of the
limitations of their immediate environment, gives them
access to an expanded range of ideas and information,
encourages a more participatory relationship to their
culture and their government, empowers them to ask
important questions of adult authorities, and makes it
possible to distribute the products of their reactive
impulses to a much larger public. In the long term, such
shifts in their perception of themselves and the world
around them will have a profound impact on their future
roles as citizens, workers, consumers, and parents.

3. The increased visibility of youth culture. A dramatic

increase in the birthrate in the wake of the Second
World War generated a huge demographic bubble we
now call "the Baby Boom." Sociologists are suggesting
that America once again is undergoing a dramatic
increase in the number of children and youth in relation
to the adult population. At the present moment, roughly
30 percent of the American population were born
between 1977 and 1997, compared to those born
between 1946 and 1964 (the so-called Baby Boom)
which constitutes 29 percent of the current population
and those born between 1965 and 1976 (the so-called
Generation X) who constitute 16 percent of the
population. [15] This demographic shift is already being
felt in terms of the impact of youth tastes upon mass
media content. More and more films, television shows,
and other media products are being made to appeal to
youth tastes. Adults are feeling more and more
estranged from the dominant forms of popular culture,
which n ow reflect their children's values rather than
their own.

Moreover, youth culture is more exposed to adult

scrutiny than ever before. Video games have emerged
as an entertainment genre in the context of children's
diminished access to real world play spaces. [16] When
I was growing up in suburban Atlanta in the 1960s,
there were numerous backlots where we could play
largely outside of adult control and supervision. These
back lots were where "boy culture" took shape. What E.
Anthony Rotundo calls "boy culture" emerged in the
context of the growing separation of the male public
sphere and the female private sphere in the wake of
the industrial revolution. [17] Boys were cut off from the
work life of their fathers and left under the care of their
mothers. According to Rotundo, boys escaped from the
home into the outdoors play space, freeing them to
participate in a semi-autonomous "boy culture" which
cast itself in opposition to maternal culture:

Where women's sphere offered kindness,

morality, nurture and a gentle spirit, the
boys' world countered with energy, self-
assertion, noise, and a frequent resort to
violence. The physical explosiveness and
the willingness to inflect pain contrasted
so sharply with the values of the home
that they suggest a dialogue in actions
between the values of the two spheres ó
as if a boy's aggressive impulses, so
relentlessly opposed at home, sought
extreme forms of release outside it; then,
with stricken consciences, the boys came
home for further lessons in self-restraint.
(Rotundo, p.37)

The boys took transgressing maternal prohibitions as

proof they weren't "mama's boys." Rotundo argues that
this break with the mother was a necessary step
towards autonomous manhood.

In the late twentieth century, children have a

diminished access to real world play spaces for many
different reasons: there is less and less space in our
increasing urban and suburban culture that is not
developed; more and more children live in apartment
complexs and do not have backyards; more and more
 people feel anxious about the safety of their children
playing in public parks and in their neighborhoods.
Video games offer these latchkey children a virtual
playspace that enables them to engage in competitive
or exploratory play within the safety of their own homes;
video games promise children a "complete freedom of
movement" that contrasts sharply with their direct
experience of domestic confinement. In doing so, they
transmit many of the values of traditional "boy culture"
into this technological environment. Much as earlier
kids gained recognition from their peers for their daring,
often proven through stunts (such as swinging on vines,
climbing trees, or leaping from rocks as they cross
streams) o r through pranks (such as stealing apples or
doing mischief on adults), video games allow kids to
gain recognition for their daring as demonstrated in the
virtual worlds of the game, overcoming obstacles,
beating bosses, and mastering levels. The central
virtues of the 19th century "boy culture" were mastery
and self-control. The central virtues of video game
culture are mastery (over the technical skills required
by the games) and self-control (manual dexterity).
Traditional "boy culture" was hierarchical with a
member's status dependent upon competitive activity,
direct confrontation and physical challenges. The boy
fought for a place in the gang's inner circle, hoping to
win admiration and respect. Twentieth century video
game culture can also be hierarchical with a member
gaining status by being able to complete a game or log
a big score. Far from a "corruption" of the culture of
childhood, video games show strong continuities to the
boyhood play fondly remembered by previous
generations.

There is a significant difference, however. The 19th

century "boy culture" enjoyed such freedom and
autonomy precisely because their activities were
staged within a larger expanse of space, because boys
could occupy an environment largely unsupervised by
adults. Nineteenth century boys sought indirect means
of breaking with their mothers, escaping to spaces that
were outside their control, engaging in secret activities
they knew would have met parental disapproval. The
mothers, on the other hand, rarely had to confront the
nature of this "boy culture" and often didn't even know
that it existed. The video game culture, on the other
hand, occurs in plain sight, in the middle of the family
living room, or at best, in children's rooms.

Mothers come face to face with the messy process by

which western culture turns boys into men, and it
becomes the focus of open antagonisms and the
subject of tremendous guilt and anxiety.

Similarly, Harris and Klebold's websites exposed their

darkest thoughts, fantasies, and plans to public
scrutiny. They were hidden in plain sight, there for
anyone to see. Some neighbors brought the website to
the attention of the local police well before the
shootings occurred. Several organizations committed
to monitoring hate groups knew of their existence and
had records of their ramblings in their files. The police
did not adequately respond to that knowledge; adults
didn't take their fantasies seriously enough. Indeed, if
we had developed a better grasp of contemporary
youth culture and its various symbols, we might have
been able to meaningfully distinguish between normal
adolescent restlessness and the signs of an
emotionally disturbed personality. But the fact that their
plots and schemes were out there on the web, rather
than scribbled in a diary hidden under their bed,
suggests that this new technology makes it possible for
us to see and know more about our sons and daughters
than ever before. So much of the coverage of this youth
culture emphasizes the degree to which it is hidden
from adult view, but actually, the opposite is the case.
We are frightened because the youth culture is being
brought into our view for the first time. If we are
ignorant of contemporary youth culture, it can only be
described as willful ignorance in a world where children
are playing out their violent fantasies under their
parents' noses and posting their aggressive desires
onto the world wide web.

The media backlash against popular culture in the wake of the

Littleton shootings reflects these three factors: our generational
anxiety about the process of adolescence, our technophobic
reaction about our children's greater comfort with digital
technologies, and our painful discovery of aspects of our
children's play and fantasy lives which have long existed but
were once hidden from view. Read in this context, the
materials of youth culture can look profoundly frightening, but
much of what scares us is a product of our own troubled
imaginations and is far removed from what these symbols
mean to our children.

All of the above suggests a basic conclusion: banning specific

media images will have little or no impact on the problem of
youth crime, because doing so gets at symbols, not at the
meanings those symbols carry and not at the social reality that
gives such urgency to teens' investments in those cultural
materials. A model that reduces such complex cultural
phenomenon to a series of crude stimuli and responses
doesn't provide much guidance in how to actually respond to
our changing media environment. What we need to do is learn
more than we have so far about what are children are doing
with these new media, what place the contents of popular
culture have assumed in their social and cultural life, and what
personal and subcultural meanings they invest in such
symbols. The best way to do that is to create opportunities for
serious conversations about the nature of our children's
relationships with popular culture. One project which sets a
good example for such discussions is the ìSuperhero TV
Projectî conducted by Ellen Seiter at the University of
California-San Diego. Seiter recognized the centrality of
superhero cartoons, games, comics, and action heroes to
preschool children and recognized the recurring concerns
parents and teachers had about the place of those materials in
the children's lives. [18] Seiter and her graduate students
worked with teachers to encourage classroom activities that
center around these superhero myths. Students were
encouraged to invent their own superheroes and to make up
stories about them. Students discussed their stories in class
and decided that they would collaborate in the production of a
superhero play. Through the classroom discussions about
what kinds of physical actions could be represented in their
play, teachers and students talked together about the place of
violence in the superhero stories and what those violent
images meant to them. Through such conversations, both
students and teachers developed a much better understanding
of the role of violen t imagery in popular entertainment.

Such open-minded and exploratory exchanges seem vital as

we struggle to understand why our children are so invested in
these images. We should be prepared to learn, for example,
that violent images are far less central to their experience of
these stories than they are to our perception of them. Children
and adolescents may take violent images for granted, not
because they are desensitized to violence, but because they
aren't especially interested in the violence. What draws them
to these stories might have to do with the larger than life
heroics of their protagonists, with the intensity of emotion and
experience these programs offer, with the heady rush of rapid
action and flashy visual style. In researching my recent book
on gender and computer games, I stumbled onto the Quake
Grrlz movement. [19] These young women in their teens and
early twenties were, like Harris and Klebold, involved in on-line
gaming, designing their own combat arenas, "combating"
others who shared their seemi ngly "blood-thirsty" tastes and
interests. What drew these young women to games like Quake
and Doom, however, wasn't that you could see blood spurt
when you shot your opponents but simply that the digital
environment, for the first time, allowed women to aggressively
compete with men without regard to the physical differences
between the genders. These women were taking great
pleasure in beating the boys at their own games; they
experienced the aggressive on-line play as a vehicle of
empowerment, arguing that learning to play fantasy combat as
a child would help them prepare --mentally and emotionally --
for professional lives where they would have to compete with
men. One of the women explained, "Maybe it's a
problem...that little girls DON'T like to play games that
slaughter entire planets. Maybe that's why we are still
underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights. Maybe if
we had the mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight
some of the smaller battles we face everyday. " Playing these
games had led these women to form on-line communities that
offered technical and moral support to other women, that
staged critical debates about those aspects of contemporary
fighting games that displeased these women, that
foregrounded the accomplishments of women in the game
industry, and that helped to organize consumer activism
campaigns to insure a better match between popular culture
and their own needs and interests.

Writing for the slashdot.com website, journalist Jon Katz has

described a fundamentally different reaction to popular culture
in high schools across America in the wake of the Littleton
shootings [Appendix B] . Schools are shutting down student
access to the net and the web. Parents are cutting their
children off from access to their on-line friends or forbidding
them to play computer games. Students are being suspended
for coming to school displaying one or another cultural symbol
(black trench coats, heavy metal T-shirts). Students are being
punished or sent into therapy because they express opinions
in class discussions or essays that differ from the views about
the events being promoted by their teachers. Guidance
counselors are drawing on checklists of symptoms of
maladjustment to try to ferret out those students who are
outsiders and either force them into the mainstream or punish
them for their dissent. The various letters Katz has reproduced
through his column make for chilling reading because they
suggest the consequence of adult ignorance about youth
culture and their intolerance of any form of expression that
differs from their own norms and values. Rather than teaching
students to be more tolerant of the diversity they encounter in
the contemporary high school, these educators and
administrators are teaching their students that difference is
dangerous, that individuality should be punished, and that self
expression should be curbed. In this polarized climate, it
becomes impossible for young people to explain to us what
their popular culture means to them without fear of
repercussion and reprisals. We are pushing this culture further
and further underground where it will be harder and harder for
us to study and understand it. We are cutting off students at
risk from the lifeline provided by their on-line support groups.

We all want to do something about the children at risk . We all

want to do something about the proliferation of violent imagery
in our culture. We all want to do something to make sure
events like the Littleton shootings do not occur again. But
repression of youth culture is doomed not only to fail but to
backfire against us. Instead, we need to take the following
steps:

1. We need to create contexts where students can form

meaningful and supportive communities through their
use of digital media. Sameer Parekh, a 24-year-old
software entrepreneur, has offered one such model
through his development of the High School
Underground website (http://www.hsunderground.com).
His site invites students who feel ostracized at school to
use the web as a means of communicating with each
other about their concerns, as a tool of creative
expression and social protest, as the basis for forming
alliances that leads to an end of the feelings of
loneliness and isolation. [Appendix C] We need to have
more spaces like High School Underground that
provide a creative and constructive direction for
children who are feeling cut off from others in their
schools or communities. A number of websites have
been built within the goth subculture to explain its
perplexing images to newcomers, to challenge its
representati on in the major media, and to rally support
for the victims of the shootings. [Appendix D]

2. We also need to work on building a more accepting and

accommodating climate in our schools, one which is
more tolerant of difference, one which seeks to
understand the cultural choices made by students
rather than trying to prohibit them open expression. A
core assumption behind any democratic culture is that
truth is best reached through the free market of ideas,
not through the repression of controversial views.
Popular culture has become a central vehicle by which
we debate core issues in our society. Our students
need to learn how to process and evaluate those
materials and reach their own judgements about what
is valuable and what isn't in the array of media entering
their lives. They need to do this in a context that
respects their right to dignity and protects them from
unreasoned and unreasonable degrees of abuse. What
should have rang alarm bells for us in the aftermath of
the Littleton shooting is how alone and at risk students
can feel in their schools and how important it is for us to
have a r ange of different activities, supported by caring
and committed teachers, which can pull all of our
students into the school community and not simply
those the school values because of their good grades,
good sports skills, or good conduct. All signs are that
Harris and Klebold were enormously talent and created
kids who never found an outlet where they could get
respect for what they created from the adults in their
community.

3. We need to provide more support for media education

in our schools. Given the centrality of media in
contemporary life, media issues need to be integrated
into all aspects of our K-12 curriculum, not as a special
treat, but as something central to our expectations
about what children need to learn about their
environment. Most contemporary media education is
 designed to encourage children to distance themselves
from media culture. The governing logic is "just say no
to Nintendo" and "turn off your television set." Instead,
we need to focus on teaching children how to be safe,
critical, and creative users of media. Research
suggests that when we tell students that popular culture
has no place in our classroom discussions, we are also
signaling to them that what they learn in school has little
or nothing to say about the things that matter to them in
their after school hours. [20]

4. For this new kind of media literacy to work, our teachers

and administrators need to be better informed about the
nature of popular culture and their students'
investments in media imagery. Such understanding
cannot start from the assumption that such culture is
meaningless or worthless, but has to start from the
recognition that popular culture is deeply significant to
those who are its most active consumers and
participants. The contents of that culture shift constantly
and so we need to be up to date on youth subcultures,
on popular music, on popular programs.

5. We need to provide fuller information to parents about

the content of media products so that they can make
meaningful and informed choices about what forms of
popular culture they want to allow into their homes.
They need to know what their children are consuming
and why it appeals to them. The ratings system
introduced by the game industry goes a long way
towards addressing this concern, establishing a
consistent base-line against which to measure the
content of video games. But the ratings system for
games and for television needs to be more nuanced,
needs to provide more specific information. We also
need to create more websites where parents respond
to the games and other media products they have
purchased and share their insights and reactions with
other parents.

6. We need to challenge the entertainment industry to

investigate more fully why violent entertainment
appeals to young consumers and then to become more
innovative and creative at providing alternative
fantasies that satisfy their needs for empowerment,
competition, and social affiliation.

Sources

[1] Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and

Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[2] Henry Jenkins (Ed.), The Children's Culture Reader (New

York: New York University Press, 1998); Justine Cassell and
Henry Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender
and Computer Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

[3] For a representative overview, see, for example, "Outsider

Culture: A Guide to Terms that Emerged from Colorado
Tragedy," Boston Globe, Friday April 23 1999, p.c1.]

[4] Cassell and Jenkins, op. cit.

[5] Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net

Generation (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1998).

[6] Jon Katz, "The Price of Being Different," posted Thursday

April 29, @12:15PM EDT on slashdot.com
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?
sid=99/04/29/0124247&mode=thread&threshold=0)

[7] For a useful overview of why social and cultural contexts of

violent images matter, see Marsha Kinder, "Contextualizing
Video Game Violence: From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1
to Mortal Kombat 2, " in Patricia M. Greenfield and Rodney R.
Cooking (Eds.) Interacting with Video (Norwood, NJ: Ablex,
1996).

[8] For an overview of this research, see Bob Hodge and

David Tripp, Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986).

[9] For an important collection on the meaningfulness of play

for humans and animals, see J. S. Bruner, A. Jolly, and K.
Sylva (Eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution (New
York: Penguin, 1976).

[10] For a useful series of discussions about fantasy (sexual

and otherwise), see Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged:
Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New
York: Grove/Atlantic, 1996).
[11] For the role of play as a vehicle for staging and releasing
antisocial impulses, see Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L.
Singer, The House of Make-Believe: Children's Play and The
Developing Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990)

[12] For useful overviews of the role of cultural symbols in

defining youth subcultures, see Dick Hebdidge, Subculture:
The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1993); Ken Gilder
and Sarah Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader (London:
Routledge, 1997).

[13] Shannon Henry and John Schwartz, "Teens Use

Technology Their Way," The Washington Post, Saturday, April
24, 1999; Page A1

[14] Jon Katz, Virtuous Reality (New York: Random House,

1997), p. 173.

[15] Tapscott, p. 21.

[16] Henry Jenkins, "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video

Games as Gendered Play Spaces," in Justine Cassell and
Henry Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender
and Computer Games (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), pp.
262-297.

[17] E. Arthur Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations

in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New
York: Basic, 1994).

[18] See, for example, Ellen Seiter, Television and New Media
Audiences (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). See,
also, http://www.southmoon.com/info_herotv.html.

[19] See "Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk
Back," in Cassell and Jenkins (op. cit.), pp.328-341.

[20] Hodge and Tripp, op. cit.

Appendix A

Excerpts from an on-line discussion among MIT students:

We talk about making school safe for all every day, and
that means the geeks, too.

Is it so wrong for everyone to be safe from getting

picked on?

Speaking from personal experience, the geeks & nerds

who do conform are survivalists, and the rest of the
geeks & nerds individualists.

And the conforming geeks/nerds are still very lonely.

Personally, I think teachers and other adult mentors

really play a big role in preventing most geeks & nerds
from going over the edge and blow up the schools.
From my own experience, without all of my teachers'
support, I might have went ahead and blew up the
school myself, too.

The human mind seeks attention anyway it could get.

Being inventive & ingenuous, man goes into many
niches over his lifetime in his quest for recognition. It is
because of this quality that we have as colorful & varied
society as we do today.

And it is also this quality that drove a significant portion

of the high schoolers into dressing all black & listening
to alternative music.

And, unfortunately, it is also this quality that drove the

jocks & others into picking upon these other alternative
people in school.

Most of the people I'm really close to were

bullied/abused/harassed to the point of tears, drugs,
therapy, suicidal thoughts, anger, hatred, etc.
throughout our lives in school, both public and private.
However, none of us killed anyone. In my case, it
certainly wasn't due to lack of weapons. In high school,
we had guns in the house, locked in a safe to which I
had the combo, and I went to the shooting range with
my father. I had a recurring fantasy of cutting off the
hair of the girl who's locker was next to mine, because
she fucking brushed it in my face every fucking day.
But I didn't kill her. Why not? Part of it is the timing of
certain influences. I had really supportive older sisters.
One of my friends had an older brother whom he
worshipped who became a militantly racist skinhead,
and he followed right along. I was deeply disappointed
at what I considered the loss of that friend.

Anyway, personal anecdotes aside, I think the abuse

that goes on in schools played a part in this. I hate the
fact that this is written off as a normal part of
adolescence. The "concerned adults" involved should
think about preventing this abuse, rather than waiting
until these kids are on the verge of actually snapping
before they intervene. Also, I think there was
something much more fundamentally wrong with these
kids, either with their home lives and influences, some
inherent mental problems, or both.

I think the fundamental part of my existence has always

been an intense feeling of isolation, which manifested
itself in all my different phases of conformity.

Teased from a young age simply because the kids

knew they could get a rise out of me- I tried and tried to
be like everyone else. Got the Gap pants, the jean
jacket and everything. Purposefully did average on
spelling tests and the like. I'd always be accepted for a
little while, then it'd become apparent that I was
somehow different (maybe I tried too hard) then the
circle would come full round and I'd get ostracized.

Once I joined the jocks, once the punk rockers, once

the drama kids, once the college students, once the
towers club, whatever.

It didn't ever come down to expression of the self. It

was always a desire to connect with others. And it still
pervades my actions. And I still feel isolated. Although
admittedly, MIT (and my own personal achievements)
has given me just enough of an ego to be able to say
"Fuck You" and not let the isolation affect me. But hey, I
still cry about it.

I kind of empathize with the Col. kids....To do what they

did, they couldn't have been part of any group, not even
trench-coat wearing doom players (I was one of those
kids once too), they were completely alone (and maybe
they suffered from some major chemical imbalance
too).

Those of you in the house that know me at all and

especially those of you that have seen me in person
lately know that something like this thing in Colorado
would've and did bother me a lot.

A couple of words on it:

1) I have to start by saying that it was an utterly

atrocious and despicable series of acts that would've
made me happy to see the gunmen be executed if they
hadn't already killed themselves.

2) However, a number of things about the whole

incident have been bothering me. To begin with, the
media coverage of the incident has made me so
outraged I've barely been able to restrain myself. I have
never been so angered by the combination of poor
journalism (in lack of proper facts), buzzword use, and
general tastelessness.

The first two of these issues are incredibly apparent in

the media's depiction of the gunmen. Immediately, the
gunmen were completely bogusly classified as "goths"
simply because they wore black trenchcoats and
supposedly listened to Marilyn Manson. This is the
most absurd thing I could've ever imagined. If wearing
black trenchcoats made one goth or a killer, than half of
Boston in the winter time are crazied goth maniacs.

Additionally, if the media had done even a modicum of

research, they would've learned that Marilyn Manson is
so far from goth its ridiculous. This is like saying Gwar,
White Zombie, Tool, or hell, Dolly Parton is goth.

This instant "goth" classification was replicated

throughout the media and spread like wild fire. It's kind
of interesting, with a few rare exceptions (such an
article today in the NY Post), no retraction of this error
was made. BTW, as an aside, numerous goth boys and
girls at high schools all over the U.S. today were
ridiculed and beaten up even more than usual...I doubt
you'll hear anything about that either.

But besides the extreme slandering of goths, not only

was the goth subculture dragged out as the whipping
boy on this one...here's a partial list of everything else
I've heard it blamed on:
 Marilyn Manson
KMFDM
Hitler and the Nazis
anarchism
role-playing games (again...man, feels like the
80s again, no?)
guns
computer games
trench coats
gangster rap

And a dozen other of the media's favorite whipping

boys.

The media also couldn't have been more tacky and

tasteless. The very next day on the NY Times website,
a virtual walk through of the Columbine high school
marking rooms where the gunmen killed people was on
line. Am I the only one who finds this incredibly in poor
taste?! Also, the very next day, every talk show was
doing a special on the shootings, from Oprah to Leeza,
and so forth. And from the snippets I saw of any of
them, they were all so ridiculously manipulative of the
sad emotions surrounding the incident for ratings it was
sickening.

3) Certain issues regarding the incident have been

bugging me a lot, and actually kept me near sleepless
on some issues. Here's the thing, I, like a couple others
of you I suspect, was horribly made fun of in school.
For eleven years of my life, I was the subject of nearly
constant ridicule, remarks, physical violence, you name
it. I was every bully's wet dream ñ a little scrawny kid
with red hair, braces, freckles, glasses, the works. And
thinking back, I do remember numerous times
throughout my youth when while being mocked,
ridiculed, tortured, whatever, that I thought to myself
"man, I'm gonna kill that sucker".

So what made me different than these kids in

Colorado? Why *didn't* I flip out and go on a killing
spree, and why *did* they? This seems like a
deceptively simple question at first -- "they were sickos"
-- but it really isn't. I mean it's like the old bumper
sticker someone pointed out to me recently: "Bigots
aren't born bigots." Now, while I place almost all the
blame of the incident on the two gunmen, I still have to
wonder... What events occurred in my life that
prevented me from doing something like this that didn't
occur in theirs? Or vice versa, what events occurred in
their lives that I never encountered that made them lash
out in the manner they did? It really isn't a simple
question...

4) Finally, ever since the incident, every single time I

turn on the TV, there's another psychologist talking
about: a) how he saw it coming, but no one would listen
to him, b) the "warning signs" if your kid might be ready
to snap and turn violent. Now, quite frankly, when I
heard about this, I wasn't too surprised. I was shocked
at the size of it, and I will always be utterly disgusted by
the entire incident, but I wasn't too surprised...I seem to
hear about incidents like this every week with just a
much lower body count. However, it's the (b) of above
that bothers me the most.

I get a sick feeling whenever I see these cheap 2-bit

psychologists tell the warning signs of your child is
going to snap and whatever show their on puts in on
the air with some slick computer graphics. For not only
are they incredibly broad and encompassing, such that
almost everyone I know fits them, they are completely
the wrong goal. Why does no one understand that
when these incidents happen time and time again, in
each case, the kids doing this are in massive amounts
of pain from something and incredibly angry about
something. Parents and teachers shouldn't be looking
for "once these students are in pain and troubled,
here's some signs that they might snap", instead, it
should be a step before that. There should be warning
signs for "the student is starting to become hurt and
angry" (ie., not once he's hurt and angry, THEN trying
to look for those that might lash out violently).

The mind set is just completely wrong.

Appendix B

Posted by Jon Katz on Monday April 26, @12:26PM EDT

In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country

went on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a
profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that
left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an
even worse situation than before. Stories all over the country
embarked on witch hunts that amounted to little more than
Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's column here, these
voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and
powerless in their own schools -- have been e-mailing me with
stories of what has happened to them in the past few days.
Here are some of those stories in their own words, with
gratitude and admiration for their courage in sending them.
The big story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the
Internet, or whether or not video games are turning out kids
into killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best,
brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare
of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger.

The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages
or the TV talk shows. It wasn't whether the Net is a place for
hate-mongers and bomb-makers, or whether video games are
turning your kids into killers. It was the spotlight the Littleton,
Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many
individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a
Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and
rage.

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Todd Solondz's Welcome

To The Dollhouse, and a string of comically-bitter teen movies
from Hollywood, pop culture has been trying to get this
message out for years. For many kids -- often the best and
brightest -- school is a nightmare.

People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks.

The lucky ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed,
humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially.
Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are
exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity,
curiousity - are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the
Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure that this message got
heard, by a society that seems desperate not to hear it.

Minutes after the "Kids That Kill" column was posted on

Slashdot Friday, and all through the weekend, I got a steady
stream of e-mail from middle and high school kids all over the
country -- especially from self-described oddballs. They were
in trouble, or saw themselves that way to one degree or
another in the hysteria sweeping the country after the
shootings in Colorado.

Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt

for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the
strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the
normal, to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was to be
dangerous.

Schools all over the country openly embraced Geek Profiling.

One group calling itself the National School Safety Center
issued a checklist of "dangerous signs" to watch for in kids: it
included mood swings, a fondness for violent TV or video
games, cursing, depression, anti-social behavior and attitudes.
(I don't know about you, but I bat a thousand).

The panic was fueled by a ceaseless bombardment of

powerful, televised images of mourning and grief in Colorado,
images that stir the emotions and demand some sort of
response, even when it isn't clear what the problem is.

The reliably blockheaded media response didn't help either.

Sixty Minutes devoted a whole hour to a broadcast on screen
violence and its impact on the young, heavily promoted by this
tease: "Are video games turning your kids into killers?" The
already embattled loners were besieged.

"This is not a rational world. Can anybody help?" asked Jamie,

head of an intense Dungeons and Dragons club in Minnesota,
whose private school guidance counselor gave him a choice:
give up the game or face counseling, possibly suspension.
Suzanne Angelica (her online handle) was told to go home
and leave her black, ankle-length raincoat there.

On the Web, kids did flock to talk to each other. On Star Wars
and X-Files mailing lists and websites and on AOL chat rooms
and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded countless
countless stories of being harassed, beaten, ostracized and
ridiculed by teachers, students and administrators for dressing
and thinking differently from the mainstream. Many said they
had some understanding of why the killers in Littleton went
over the edge.

"We want to be different," wrote one of the Colorado killers in a

diary found by the police. "We want to be strange and we don't
want jocks or other people putting us down." The sentiment, if
not the response to it, was echoed by kids all over the country.
The Littleton killings have made their lives much worse.

"It was horrible, definitely," e-mailed Bandy from New York

City. "I'm a Quake freak, I play it day and night. I'm really into
it. I play Doom a lot too, though not so much anymore. I'm up
till 3 a.m. every night. I really love it. But after Colorado, things
got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could
come in and kill them. It wasn't like they were really afraid of
me - they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even
more? People asked me if I had guns at home. This is a whole
new level of exclusion, another excuse for the preppies of the
universe to put down and isolate people like me."

It wasn't just the popular who were suspicious of the odd and
the alienated, though.

The e-mailed stories ranged from suspensions and expulsions

for "anti-social behavior" to censorship of student publications
to school and parental restrictions on computing, Web
browsing, and especially gaming. There were unconfirmed
reports that the sale of blocking software had skyrocketed.
Everywhere, school administrators pandered and panicked,
rushing to show they were highly sensitive to parents fears,
even if they were oblivious to the needs and problems of many
of their students.

In a New Jersey private school, a girl was expelled for

showing classmates a pocket-knife. School administrators
sent a letter home:

In light of the recent tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, we all

share a heightened sensitivity to potential threats to our
children. I urge you to take this time to discuss with your
children the importance of turning to adults when they have
concerns about the behavior of others."

This solution was straight out of 1984. In fact, this was one of
the things it's protagonist Winston was jailed for: refusing to
report his friends for behavior that Big Brother deemed
abnormal and disturbing.

Few of the weeks' media reports - in fact, none that I saw -

pointed out that the FBI Uniform Crime reports, issued bi-
annually, along with the Justice Departments reports
(statistical abstracts on violence are available on the
Department's website and in printed form) academic studies
and some news reports have reporters for years now.

Violence among the young is dropping across the country,

even as computing, gaming, cable TV and other media use
rises.

Unhappy, alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools,

voiceless in media, education and politics. But theirs are the
most important voices of all in understanding what happened
and perhaps even how to keep it from happening again.

I referred some of my e-mailers to peacefire.org, a children's

rights website, for help in dealing with blocking and filtering
software. I sent others to freedomforum.org (the website
Free!) for help with censorship and free speech issues, and to
geek websites, especially some on ICQ.com where kids can
talk freely.

I've chosen some e-mailers to partially reprint here. Although

almost all of these correspondents were willing to be publicly
identified - some demanded it - I'm only using their online
names, since some of their stories would put them in peril
from parents, peers or school administrators.

From Jay in the Southeast:

"I stood up in a social studies class -the teacher wanted a

discussion -- and said I could never kill anyone or condone
anyone who did kill anyone. But that I could, on some level,
understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day
after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can
learn how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over
sometimes, especially when you come to see that you're
hated only because you're smart and different, or sometimes
even because you are online a lot, which is still sound cool to
many kids?

After the class, I was called to the principal's office and told
that I had to agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or
be expelled from school, as I had expressed ?sympathy? with
the killers in Colorado, and the school had to be able to
explain itself if I ?acted out?. In other words, for speaking
freely, and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird
geek, but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with
violence in America."
From Jason in Pennsylvania: "The hate just eats you up, like
the molten metal moving up Keanu Reeve's arm in the The
Matrix. That's what I thought of when I saw it. You lose track of
what is real and what isn't. The worst people are the happiest
and do the best, the best and smartest people are the most
miserable and picked upon. The cruelty is unimaginable. If
Dan Rather wants to know why those guys killed those people
in Littleton, Colorado, tell him for me that the kids who run the
school probably drove them crazy, bit by bit? That doesn't
mean all those kids deserved to die. But a lot of kids in
America know why it happened, even if the people running
schools don't."

From Andrew in Alaska: "To be honest, I sympathized much

more with the shooters than the shootees. I am them. They
are me. This is not to say I will end the lives of my classmates
in a hail of bullets, but that their former situation bears a
striking resemblance to my own. For the most part, the media
are clueless. They're never experienced social rejection, or
chosen non-conformity. Also, I would like to postulate that the
kind of measures taken by school administration have a direct
effect on school violence. School is generally an oppressive
place; the parallels to fascist society are tantalizing. Following
a school shooting, a week or two-week crackdown ensues,
where studentsí constitutional rights are violated with impunity,
at a greater rate than previous."

From Anika78 in suburban Chicago:

"I was stopped at the door of my high school because I was

wearing a trenchcoat. I don't game, but I'm a geekchick, and
I'm on the Web a lot. (I love geek guys, and there aren't many
of us.) I was given a choice - go home and ditch the coat, or
go to the principal. I refused to go home. I have never been a
member of any group or trenchcoat mob or any hate thing,
online or any other, so why should they tell me what coat to
wear?

Two security guards took me into an office, called the school

nurse, who was a female, and they ordered me to take my
coat off. The nurse asked me to undress (privately) while the
guards outside the door went through every inch of my coat. I
wouldn't undress, and she didn't make me (I think she felt
creepy about the whole thing).

Then I was called into the principal's office and he asked me if

I was a member of any hate group, or any online group, or if I
had ever played Doom or Quake. He mentioned some other
games, but I don't remember them. I'm not a gamer, though
my boyfriends have been. I lost it then. I thought I was going to
be brave and defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried. I
think I hated that worse than anything."

FromZBird in New Jersey:

"Yeah, I've had some fantasies about taking out some of these
jerks who run the school, have parties, get on teams, are
adored by teachers, have all these friends. Sure. They hate
me. Day by day, it's like they take pieces out of you, like a
torture, one at a time. My school has 1,500 kids. I could never
make a sports team. I have never been to a party. I sit with my
friends at our own corner of the cafeteria. If we tried to join the
other kids, they'd throw up or leave. And by now, I'd rather die.

Sometimes, I do feel a lot of real pure rage. And I feel better

when I go online. Sometimes I think the games keep me from
shooting anybody, not the other way around. Cause I can get
even there, and I'm pretty powerful there. But I'd never do it.
Something much deeper was wrong with these kids in
Colorado. To shoot all those people? Make bombs? You have
to be sick, and the question they should be asking isn't what
games do they play, but how come all these high-paid
administrators, parents, teachers and so-called professional
people, how come none of them noticed how wacked they
were? I mean, in the news it said they had guns all over their
houses! They were planning this for a year. Maybe the
reporters ought to ask how come nobody noticed this, instead
of writing all these stupid stories about video games?"

From ES in New York:

High school favors people with a certain look and attitude - the
adolescent equivalent of Aryans. They are the chosen ones,
and they want to get rid of anyone who doesn't look and think
the way they do. One of the things which makes this so
infuriating is that the system favors shallow people. Anyone
who took the time to think about things would realize that
things like the prom, school spirit and who won the football
game are utterly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

So anyone with depth of thought is almost automatically

excluded from the main high school social structure. It's like
some horribly twisted form of Social Darwinism.

I would never, ever do anything at all like what was done in

Colorado. I can't understand how anyone could. But I do
understand the hatred of high school life which, I guess,
prompted it.

From Dan in Boise, Idaho:

"Be careful! I wrote an article for my school paper. The advisor

suggested we write about ?our feelings? About Colorado. My
feelings -what I wrote -- were that society is blaming the wrong
things. You can't blame screwed-up kids or the Net. These
people don't know what they were talking about. How bout
blaming a system that takes smart or weird kids and drives
them crazy? How about understanding why these kids did
what they did, cause in some crazy way, I feel something for
them. For their victims, too, but for them. I thought it was a
different point-of-view, but important. I was making a point. I
mean, I'm not going to the prom.

You know what? The article was killed, and I got sent home
with a letter to my parents. It wasn't in official suspension, but I
can't go back until Tuesday. And it was made pretty clear to
me that if I made any noise about it, it would be a suspension
or worse. So this is how they are trying to blaming a sub-
culture and not thinking about their own roles, about how
fucked-up school is. Now, I think the whole thing was a set-up,
cause a couple of other kids are being questioned too, about
what they wrote. They pretend to want to have a 'dialogue' but
kids should be warned that what they really want to know is
who's dangerous to them."

From a Slashdot reader:

"Your column Friday was okay, but you and a lot of the
Slashdot readers don't get it. You don't have the guts to stand
up and say these games are not only not evil, they are great.
They are good. They are challenging and stimulating. They
help millions of kids who have nowhere else to go, because
the whole world is set up to take care of different kinds of kids,
kids who fit in, who do what they're told, who are popular. I've
made more friends online on Gamespot.com than I have in
three years of high school. I think about my characters and my
competitions and battles all day.

Nothing I've been taught in school interests me as much. And

believe me, the gamers who (try to) kill me online all day are a
lot closer to me than the kids I go to high school with. I'm in my
own world, for sure, but it's my choice and it's a world I love.
Without it, I wouldn't have one... Last week, my father told me
he had cancelled my ISP because he had asked me not to
game so much and I still was. And when he saw the Colorado
thing online, he said, he told my Mom that he felt one of these
kids could be me'I am a resourceful geek, and I was back
online before he got to bed that night. But I have to go
underground now.

My guidance counselor, who wouldn't know a computer game

from Playboy Bunny poster, told me was Dad was being a
good parent, and here was a chance for me to re-invent
myself, be more popular, to ?mainstream.? This whole
Colorado thing, it's given them an excuse to do more of what
started this trouble in the first place - to make individuals and
different people feel like even bigger freaks."

From Jip in New England:

"Dear Mr. Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away

today, because of what they saw on television. They told me
they just couldn't be around enough to make sure that I'm
doing the right things on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told
me they didn't want to be standing at my funeral some day
because of things I was doing that they didn't know about. I am
at my best friend's house, and am pretty bummed, because
things are boring now. I hope I'll get it back."

Appendix C

The Littleton Massacre

Text taken from http://hsunderground.com

The recent massacre in Littleton, Colorado has brought into

the public eye the troubles that disaffected high school
students face, and the serious disaster that can take place
when outcast students are not provided with a means to
legally and responsibly express their frustration.

Many pundits and policymakers have spoken at length about

what they would like to do to prevent a similar massacre again
in the future. None of it, however, has treated the cause -- they
all have been treating the symptoms.

Banning trenchcoats in Denver schools will not turn

disaffected outcast rebellious teenagers into straight
productive members of society. Having been driven
underground the disaffected classes are more likely to explode
in a destructive manner such as the Littleton massacre.

Banning bizarre behavior also does not solve any problems.

As with banning trenchcoats, restricting free expression only
serves to repress the students urges to exress themselves.
These urges can then explode into destructive behavior.

Passing more regulations on firearms will not prevent another

massacre. The gunmen violated nineteen federal laws. No
additional laws will prevent a massacre such as this.
Liberalized concealed carry laws would probably help mitigate
a disaster.

The gunmen in the Littleton massacre were outcast students

who did not have any productive means to express their
opinions. They were poked fun at and did not have enough of
a feeling of self-worth in order to handle the abuse without
becoming violent.

In order to prevent future massacres of this kind, students

must be given outlets to express themselves in non-violent
ways. Students such as the Littleton gunmen will not be
satisfied with conventional mainstream mode of expression
such as writing for the school newspaper or joining student
council, because they hold non-mainstream beliefs.

When I was in high school I was often persecuted for my

beliefs. Luckily, I came from a background which taught me to
respect myself and I did not buckle under the pressure of the
persecution. Rather than buckling, I spoke out and published a
newsletter within my high school in order to educate, inform,
and most of all, satisfy my need to be heard and make a mark.
I acted completely legally, although I did make a few mistakes
along the way which I regret.

Other students in different situations will have different ways to

solve these problems within their own communities. I have
decided to found this High School Underground site in order to
help inspire students around the country to use their frustrated
energies and start doing something with them -- in particular,
publishing underground publications within their local high
school community.

Appendix D

URLS for websites that offer goth responses to the shootings

or offer an explanation of the goth ubculture.

http://www.cedep.net/~kryptik/definegoth.html

http://www.blarg.net/~icprncs/gothu.html

http://www.gothic.net/~mayfair/trenchcoat

http://lexicon.psy.tufts.edu/gothic/primer.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/6678/gothpage.htm

http://www.gothic.net/benefit

http://www.gothic.net/~mayfair/trenchcoat

http://www.gothic.net/%7Emage/goth/scouts/state

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