Be real

Okay, this is kinda like a follow up story on the killing spree business.

So of course now everyone is discussing the damaging and dangerous effects of violent video games, particularly ego-shooting games (those are the ones played in first-person-perspective), and the bad influence of hiphop/rap (mostly because of a video/song by a no name German rapper that was about running amok. The video was banned immediately; thanks to which - I imagine - the guy is a millionaire by now). All sorts of very intelligent, well-educated and worried adults give interviews discussing whether the influence of violent video games and violent song texts explains why youngsters get a gun and start shooting people in their school. What they discuss is the inflation of the boundary between reality and fiction; between the real and the virtual world - and whether or not that has something to do with said games and music.

As far as I know, there is to date no empirical survey whatsoever that would prove or exonerate violent "fiction" (in whatever form) as the cause for killing sprees. Be that as it may, what annoys me in the current discussions yet once again is that they seem to suggest "we", the adults, (that is: the normal and mentally sane adults) can of course differenciate between the virtual and the real. Or, let me put it yet another way: As if much of ourselves, our lives, our aspirations, our conception of the world wasn't virtual, that is: shaped by the imaginary (in the psychoanalytical sense). As if the distinction between reality and imagination wasn't quite impossible - because what is "real" for the psyche is a very difficult matter in the first place. (And I won't even start to discuss Baudrillard here; who, I'm sure, would have a lot of things to say about the reality or virtuality of events.)

Secondly, and even more astonishing to me, is the implicit assumption that children and young adults are idiots. As if they weren't able to discern between reality and fiction. Seriously. The "problem", as far as I see it, is that fiction causes "real" (whatever that means) feelings (which is at the same time the widely appraised benefit of fiction); and this happens despite the fact that we know we're in a fictious world. I could tell myself as much as I wanted to that Walt Disney's Snowwhite was but a movie; the queen-turned-witch still scared the shit out of me.

Finally, and this is quite a Derridaen point to make I guess, what is annoying in those kind of discussions is that it also seems to involve a discussion about the literal and the figurative (which, needless to say, is another variation of the "real" and the "unreal"). It's a discussion about what texts or games "really" mean, and whether or not kids will be able to understand and discern that "real" meaning. In regard to the said rap song about a killing spree, people were worried that kids might not read it as a form of provocative social criticism (= its "real" meaning, according to the rapper), but as an instruction manual for their next violent run around school (= the "wrong" meaning). The Derridaen question to ask would obviously be who is in the position to define the "true" or "real" meaning of a text; and if there is a "true" meaning of a text to begin with. In this particular case, it's very tricky of course, because the literal meaning isn't the literal meaning (i.e. you go to your school and shoot people is not the "true" meaning); and how, I ask you, should the generation of poor, illiterate, angry-without-a-cause, stupid boys and young men be able to understand such an intricate and complex message?