Jack Thompson and the hypodermic model

After the lecture today, I found myself looking up Jack Thompson and stumbled upon his website: www.jackthompson.org where he asks questions such as "what are your children playing? How much adult content is there in these games? Is it suitable? Is the rating any good? Does it prevent children from buying things they shouldn't be able to buy?"

In the lecture, Kevin discussed the hypodermic model where the audience is treated as a passive mass with no agency. The hypodermic model was first coined by the political scientist Harold Laswell who believed in the early period of the 1940s, held that the mass media have direct, powerful, and undifferentiated effects upon audiences. This argument may have been more valid then than now because there is the invention of the internet which opens up free information. Whereas in the past, people end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information. For example, this model was used for propaganda in World War II when Hitler controlled the media outlets.

Nonetheless, this model is used by Jack Thompson who thinks that we have to protect the young and the vulnerable from video games. This is a very ignorant approach as it doesn't account for how the audience might use the media. For example, studies show that people who engage with textual fictions are aware they are doing so. In Layman's terms, people are not idiots. They are aware they are playing a game and won't actually go around murdering people in real life after playing a game. The model also does not account for the fact that not everyone in an audience behaves in the same way. It treats people as if they are the mass, not individuals, thus imposing an assumption on the whole population. This effectively results in "othering" people who don't know any better because of stereotypes based on education, race and those in the lower socio-economic strata. Last but not least, this model gives the media much more power than it can ever have in democracy. This means that in the democratic world that we live in, people no longer rely on one means of media technology.

People have agency and the capability of not being swayed by the media.

This brings us back to Jack Thompson and his argument that video games make people violent. For example, he tried to hold video game producers responsible for the Columbine high school massacre. However, research shows that there is no simple relation between video games and making people violent. A perfectly normal person, who plays a video game, will recognise that it is a game and not actual violence.

It frustrates me that people such as Jack Thompson thinks that they can put the blame on video games alone when there are so many other media outlets that showcase violence and sex such as the television. This is not to say that it is the media alone that contributes to high crime rates.

It just seems very narrow minded to point to one thing, and use it as a scapegoat for violent crimes.