Community Conflict and the Media

Abstract

Whenever I am asked to speak or listen to others speak on a topic which contains one of those now familiar equations between the ‘media’ and something else, I experience a sudden shudder of anticipatory gloom. It is the gloom with which one might be condemned to roll a large boulder up a steep hill, in the certainty that it will roll downwards as soon as the summit is within reach. In trying to discover a precise or even meaningful connection between the media and smoking, or violence, or hygiene or drug-taking or the increasing incidence of sunspots, we are at the outset nearly always involved in a methodological error: we are trying to build discussion about human values around a mathematical metaphor. To study the influence of something on something else one is, implicitly, promising to find a numerical answer to question which cannot have a fair answer at all; we want to be able to say that a mysterious factor X in television programmes causes the viewers to behave in certain way; we half-consciously hope we will isolate the virus of violence from the totality of media content, and thereby cure society of a hitherto undiagnosed disease. But personally I doubt whether a media sociologist will ever get the Nobel Prize for Science, though I pray that one of them will one day deserve the Nobel Prize for Peace.