Page 117 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

100 David Morgan

expose children to fictional scenes that exert a negative effect on their
behavior. “By age 18 an American child will have seen 16,000 simulated
murders and 200,000 acts of violence.” If, as Socrates averred, the danger of
representations is that we become like them, the report’s conclusion would
serve as confirmation of the fear that “television alone is responsible for
10% of youth violence” (Senate 1999: 2, 5).
Yet the stark difference between the high rate of exposure to simulated
violence and the low rate of violent acts perpetrated by young people suggests,
at best, a complicated and indirect account of causation. More persuasive,
however, was a longitudinal study conducted by psychologists, which
showed that exposure of children to television violence increased their risk
of aggressive and violent behavior as young adults (Huesmann et al. 2003).
Even if the link is not strongly determinative, Socrates’ antagonism toward
images corresponds to the modern fear of media, especially new media,
suggesting that media are dangerous in part because there is a long tradition
of believing they are dangerous. In both instances, ancient and modern, the
anxiety is premised on the direct appeal of representations to domains of the
mind or body that obviate reason or moral scruple, which is often another
way of saying the influence of moral or social authority.

Pictures and children

If modern children participate in too many violent games, the fear of parents
and moralists is that they may be irrationally inclined to imitate art in real
life—to commit violent acts in school or on the playground. The menace
of art, according to moral authorities ancient and modern, is its ability to
invert its relationship with reality. Images have a way of coming to life. The
danger of images is that we become like them—we imitate them, rather than
simply the reverse. Sunday school teachers, parents, and reform-minded
congressional investigators have sounded a similar alarm. During the
nineteenth century, promoters of religious instruction became enthusiastic
about the power of images as a kind of moral technology. They celebrated
the power of illustrations in the newspapers, books, and tracts that they
published to rivet the attention of children. Engravings and lithographs were
joined to stories, primers, and catechisms to exert an almost magnetic pull
on young readers and to aid in the memorization of texts but most often to
facilitate the internalization of a lesson in indelible, felt terms. Most of the
images were deployed in one of several affective, embodied circumstances:
to enhance the humor, fear, curiosity, pity, or revulsion of viewers, especially
children. The power of an emotional association between image and viewer
colored a text and made it memorable (Morgan 1999: 223–4). The success
and appeal of images became so quickly evident to religious publishers by mid-