The Ig Noble prizes for 2004 were awarded last October but I'm just getting around to reading about them. For those unfamiliar with the Ig Nobles, they are tongue-in-cheek Nobel-ish prizes awarded to funny or strange research projects whose intent, outcome, or very existence may cast the value of the research in question. Sometimes it is just stupid and inane stuff that wins the prizes. I think the group that identified the process by which spilt coffee leaves the distinctive stains won one, but I could be wrong.
Other times though, the research actually is pretty interesting albeit not quite what we may expect from the aura of preeminence academic research likes to dress in. Two of the recent winners struck me in this respect because they are funky projects with interesting and important implications.
The first explored the sociological impact of listening to potentially destructive genres of music. Hip hop and rap get a lot of attention from talking heads due to its perception of inciting violence and moral degradation. This time, though, it was the implications of listening to country music with its infamous emphasis on hardship and suffering in forms undeserved that received formal investigation. It turns out, according to the researchers, that the downtone nature of country music actually does have an effect on listener populations and is capable of being a catalyst for suicide. 51% of the variation in urban white suicides was attributed to country music, indicating that it was enough to push people over the edge.
Actually, using the transitive verb "push" is a bit too much here. Music, video, and other media do not have transitive power to cause action in people. At best (or worst, I suppose), the method would be one of influence or inspiration, rather than causation. If you're feeling low and you partake of activities that enhance that feeling, it isn't surprising that some people will find themselves in a mental space where they decide that suicide is appropriate. That goes for any other state of mind as well. If you're a horned up yout (yes, I said yout) and you listen to funky and energetic beats laced with horned up lyrics, we shouldn't be surprised to find people getting busy with each other. If you're angry at the world and you listen to angry aggressive music, watch angry aggressive television and play angry, aggressive video games, why would we not anticipate people who end up ratcheting themselves into an angry, aggressive rage? Drugs work the same way, be they alcohol or LSD.
The point I'm trying to make is that drugs and music don't cause problems as much as feed into problems that we already have. This research into the complicity of country music in higher suicide rates among listeners doesn't mean that country music causes suicide any more than taking a dump does (I bet if you did the research, you'd find that 100% of those who kill themselves, across all demographics, have bowel movements within 72 hours of offing themselves. Bad shit!). I'm still going to avoid country though (except the upbeat stuff, like Friends in Low Places, I Got It Honest, and Take This Job and Shove It). Human behavior is just that, human behavior. We are influenced by many many factors, biological and social, but we are ultimately the only arbiters of our actions (excepting the obvious cases when we are captives to someone). When people do bad things, it is unproductive to search for causes in the media and music, although it may be worthwhile to ask why this individual, out of the millions of similar people exposed to the same media, chose to respond the way they did.
I suspect that in most of these cases, the root of the problem lies more in what they were NOT exposed to rather than solely what they were exposed to. People with healthy social relationships and rich moral environments (by which I mean environments that teach morality (general) as opposed to any specific instantiation of morality) tend to be able to deal with the world without freaking out and killing themselves or others. There are also cases when the mind seems to be overwhelmed with the reality of the modern world and ends up broken, leading to schizophrenia or depression. But most times, I think, the problems we see are due to more how a person responds to media exposure than causation due to it.
As usual, I've blathered on this topic far longer than I expected, so I'll write about the other Ig Noble (which I think is far more interesting and has greater implications) tomorrow or some close proximity thereof. Thanks for reading and toss your comments here.
Posted by Nutrimentia at March 3, 2005 09:32 PM | TrackBack