Lessons From Littleton - Henry Jenkins, pg 385-395

Recap: Marketing violence to children is a continuing problem. As was seen in the chapter about the Power Rangers. A lot of people would believe that things like this would attribute to the happenings of the Columbine School shooting. There seems to be a large amount of concern about what happened with Columbine but how the Congress plans to try and fix the situation is the problem. We have a Congress that is culturally out of touch as it were and they focused on a particular segment of the younger population in creating a “cultural war” on these people. Moving into the third phase of the “cultural war” has allowed a larger following to back the Pseudo-science of Media effects. The problem is that the “Medical Association has no specific cultural experience.” So this approach makes it even more difficult to asses what is really going on in our country with respect to the younger generations. All the baby boomers are trying to recover from the 60’s and 70’s and now we have the Gen X and Gen Y creating an even larger cultural divide.

Comment: Being that I am of the last year of baby Boomers I feel that I am actually of Gen X mentality. I can see the issues of how the cultural divide is becoming an issue whether it is in music or movies or possibly any other media. Yes, there are issues with violence in our society. Our children need to be dealt with in a fashion that allows them to grow up without feeling as if they were forced to go down a one-way street. Growing up watching Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote as far as I am concerned didn’t teach me excessive violence. And this cartoon now gets rated very high on the violence charts. Just an interesting look at what has changed and what has not.