Before the school shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, as well as before the similar tragedies in Finnish Jokela 2007 and now yesterday in Kauhajoki, the gunmen gave warnings by posting videos on YouTube. This fact is highly emphasized in the news media coverage of these events. Östersunds-Posten [Swedish] writes today that “the acceleration of violence on YouTube and in the world of videogames can [...] lead to young people not being able to tell right from wrong, or fiction from reality. Symptomatically, Kvällsposten [Swedish] emphasizes that: “After having posted the clip online Matti Juhani Saari is believed to have shot ten people”. TimesOnline writes of “the YouTube Gunman” (!). In spite of the deep tragedy of this event, a dangerous form of causality is inherent in such discourse. “After having posted the clip” Saari killed ten people. X leads to Y, or what?
Influenced by the classic theory of moral panics, Danish media researcher Kirsten Drotner has written on what she labels media panics.The latter concept refers to the recurring type of societal reactions wherein new media and novel technologies get blamed for causing behaviors and events that rather obviously have other causes. These school shootings are examples of such events. Looking back, we often laugh nostalgically at the obvious fallacies of earlier debates on youth and media, and on parental responsibility. The dime novels of the late 19th century, the wild west comic books of the 1950s, the pelvic thrusts of Elvis, and the VCR. In the rearview mirror, the repetitiveness or, to use Drotner’s term, “historical amnesia” of reactions such as these becomes all too obvious. It is apparent that this is about something else.
At every point in time when a new medium enters the stage, this tends to lead to strikingly similiar debates on basic social and cultural norms. On some occasions these debates get heated and affected, that is when we talk of “media panics”. The discussion is often polarized. The medium is demonized by some while celebrated or de-dramatized by others. In the news, it is often the negative side that becomes the most visible. The message tends to come from an “adult” direction: Teachers, librarians, cultural critics, politicians and researchers – each and everyone with their own interests and stakes in the issue – produce diagnoses and offer “solutions” directed towards children and young people. The new medium under discussion becomes a fitting rhetorical device in discussions that are, in fact, about something completely different.
Of course, these media panics tell us less about the discussed mediums as such, and more about social and cultural dilemmas that are of a wider character. The moralizing discourse on YouTube, for example, directs attention away from what is actually happening. For example the fact that the US (where, of course, Virginia Tech is located) displays the highest level of gun ownership in the world, or that Finland (where, of course, Jokela and Kauhajoki are located) comes in third on the same list. Somewhere around 1.6 millon firearms are owned privately by Finnish individuals, and the gunlaws rank among the least restrictive in Europe. You need to be no more than 15 years of age to legally acquire a gun. Meanwhile in Virginia, anyone over 21 is allowed to buy a handgun a month, as long as they have not received a permit to buy even more. It goes without saying that neither YouTube as a medium, nor the laws as such lead in any natural or given way to school shootings taking place. Still, it makes you wonder what happened to the social analysis.
