shock n 1: a sudden or violent mental or emotional disturbance 2: to strike with surprise, terror, horror, or disgust. ~ing adj extremely startling, distressing or offensive de-sen-si-tize vt 1: to extinguish and emotional response (as of fear, anxiety or guilt) to stimuli that formerly induced it October 30, 1938, 8:00 p.m. EST, WABC radio network: "Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, Central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Ill., reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation, and describes the phenomenon as 'like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun.' We now return you to the music of Ramon Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York." The ensuing hour-long radio address, H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," causes widespread panic and hysteria across the United States, particularly in New York and New Jersey, where the audience later finds out the Martians will be attacking and raiding with gas. Though it was said at the beginning and reiterated four times throughout the broadcast, that the address was a presentation of Mercury Theater on the Air, thousands of people fled their homes, called police to ask for instructions, and volunteered their medical services to victims.
Going back through history, shock has always been used as a means of getting someone's attention and/or for increasing power.
Shock value was the principle behind the circus side shows, a reason for using public humiliation as punishment, and a way to manipulate mass numbers of people into believing a piece of information or a way of thinking.
Defining shock is not difficult.
"[Our society] sets up boundaries," George Lewis, a professor of sociology for the University of the Pacific (UOP) said. "Shock comes when people step over those boundaries. There are standards across which society says we shouldn't step, and when we do, that's what shock is."
But defining what is shocking is not a cut-and-dry process. Different things shock different people, and in different ways. Atheists may shock a person with a strong faith in God, and someone who enjoys being homeless may shock a rich person.
Some of the things that have shocked us most have not meant to be shocking. When Elvis Prestley began swiveling his hips during a performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," it was considered so shocking that the camera would not move below his hips. Elvis had not meant it to be shocking, he was just enjoying his music. Yet many parents were horrified by what they and their children were seeing.
Shock is sometimes used to entertain and horrify, such as the bloody violence in horror movies. Other times, it is used to bring a sense of reality and to get a point across. The World War II movie "Saving Private Ryan" opened with 30 minutes of bloody warfare depicting a scene from D-Day. The scene was meant to put the viewer right in the middle of the action, to jolt them by showing what the war was really like, not the glorious event Hollywood has made it out to be.
As the media has become more aware of the benefits of shock as a way of getting attention, the level of shock use has increased. Television shows, the evening news, advertisers, the film industry, and musicians have all realized the potential of shocking material.
Ah yes, the all important television. Where would America's youth be without television? The average American will have spent more time watching television than attending school by the time he is 17 years old.
Television has been a focal point of public outcry in recent decades. In 1996, the television industry gave in to Congress and created a ratings system for its shows, and new television sets are required by law to have a V-chip (a content-filtering chip) built in.
Television is all about selling advertisements. Unlike premium cable channels, basic cable and networks such as ABC and CBS would make no money without advertisements.
To win over advertisers, programs need to win over viewers.
"The name of the game is to get people's attention," George said.
Quinwen Dong, a professor of mass communication at UOP, said attention is the reason for running shows with high shock value. By running shows like "Jerry Springer" and "Real TV," the networks know they are going to draw people's attention, Dong said.
With shows such as "When Animals Attack," "World's Wildest Police Videos," and the goriest evening news around, Fox is undisputedly at the top of the television shock chain.
"Fox was attempting to break into the big three [NBC, ABC, CBS] by garnering a specific audience," Lewis said. "Shock was the way to get people's attention and switch them over [to the Fox network]."
In its undying quest for attention, network television recently shocked millions of viewers last Oct. 14, during an episode of the CBS show "Chicago Hope." The hospital drama, wanting to make the dialogue more realistic, had a character mutter the phrase "shit happens" after a very intense scene about a possible botched surgery that killed a patient.
This utterance has not yet joined the list of "acceptable" swear words - damn, hell, ass, and sometimes bitch - and probably will not anytime soon. But the gamble paid off for the network; they got their coveted attention.
More troublesome to most viewers than the language is the amount of television violence. Everything from Fox's "When Animals Attack" to the evening news is filled with violence.
"On the evening news," Dong said, "the first story is murder, the second story is murder, the third story is murder, and eventually that will penetrate an image into the viewer's mind. The viewers will then develop a different reaction to the violence in the real world."
This "different reaction" most commonly takes the form of either desensitization or fear, or both, Lewis and Dong said.
After countless studies, these two reactions have risen to the surface, Lewis said. "If viewers see three murders a day on the news, they assume that is the norm, and are only shocked when there are seven murders. Twenty years ago, three murders a day would have shocked people into taking action. Now, we see it as the norm."
As people become more apathetic toward a particular thing, the media must begin looking for a new, more shocking thing to present in order to keep the audience's interest.
An example of this increased level of shock is a comparison between horror movies "Psycho" and "Scream." "Psycho," released in 1960, scared the bejesus out of its viewers, especially during the famous shower scene in which Marian Crane is stabbed to death. Only the shadow of the knife and blood running down the drain is shown. "Scream" shocked its viewers with, among other things, a very graphic, gutted body on a front porch. When "Psycho" was remade last year, it was met with little interest, and nearly everyone in the audience left wondering what the big stink about the movie was the first time around.
With all the graphic violence shown on television and in movies, "it makes shock something that has less of an impact on people," Lewis said. "We can watch this stuff on TV and say 'it's not happening to me, so it's not that big of a deal.'"
The opposite can also be true. Studies have also shown that "the more people are watching television as opposed to being out, the more afraid they are of the real world," Lewis said. "They are substituting a television-based reality in terms of shock and violence, and assuming it to be the way the world really operates."
"If you watch TV constantly," Dong said, "you can become fearful. You develop the idea that we live in a mean world. We call it Mean World Syndrome."
In a society that is increasingly impatient, has a short attention span, and loves to channel surf, advertisers face many challenges in trying to get their name out. Some advertisers do not even bother showing their product anymore - just getting their name out is hard enough.
"Advertisers ask, 'Can we link our product somehow into the collective fantasies, desires, guilts, and anxieties of the audience?'" Lewis said. "You try to tie your ad into something else, such as sexual issues. Talking about what the product does has become secondary."
The "there is no such thing as negative publicity" concept has been taken to extremes by companies such as Benetton, Calvin Klein and Robert Stock Ltd.
"You know even if [the viewers] don't like [the ads], they stick in their mind," Stock said, "and that's what advertising is all about."
Calvin Klein has been stirring things up for the past 20 years. In 1980, a television ad starring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields showed her looking into the camera and seductively purring "What comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing."
Klein sparked an FBI investigation in 1995 over an ad campaign featuring males and females who appear to be underage striking suggestive poses against backgrounds reminiscent of 1960s porno films. One newspaper ad showed a girl lying in a way that her panties were prominently exposed beneath her skirt. A television ad starring a teenaged boy perhaps caused the biggest flap. A behind-camera voice can be clearly heard saying "Take off your shirt. Turn around. Can you slip that down? Nice body. Sit down on the ladder" as the boy follows the orders. The voice was done by the host of an X-rated cable show called "Men in Films."
Benetton has been no stranger to shock either. Some examples of their print ads: a blood-stained uniform of a dead Bosnian soldier; a priest and a nun kissing; a newborn baby complete with umbilical cord and placenta; and a collage of 56 close-up "crotch shots" of every race, gender and age.
Their latest advertisement campaign is a 98 page "magazine" profiling inmates on death row. And, as usual, there is no mention of their product. Just their name. Benetton.
So why do advertisers feel such a strong urge to shock their potential consumers?
"You have about 15 seconds to get someone's attention," Lewis said. "If you slap them across the face, you will get their attention. Advertisers see that that kind of thing works."
Music, the scapegoat of the world. In the 1920s, parents were shocked by their kids listening to swing. Then came rock n' roll, Elvis, the Beatles, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, rap, and now Marilyn Manson (the group and the person).
Rap group 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album brought legal action in five states after its 1989 release. Two Goths were charged with murder in 1997, and cited a passion for Marilyn Manson. Last year, fingers were pointed at Manson and metal group Rammstein after the Columbine massacre.
Manson has drawn attention and criticism for lyrics about Satanism, sodomy, pornography, drug abuse, child abuse, transvestitism, fascism, rape, murder, self-mutilation, and cruelty to animals, just to name a few. His stage antics - which have included having sex on stage, and burning crosses, American flags, and Bibles - have led to the band's being banned from England, Salt Lake City, and various other places around the globe.
Says Manson, the person, "I don't want to discriminate in who I piss off. I want to piss everybody off."
2 Live Crew's album was the first album to ever be labeled obscene by a court, and a judge made it illegal to sell the album or perform its songs in three Florida counties. Those songs included "Me So Horny," "Dirty Nursery Rhymes," "The F- Shop," and "If You Believe In Having Sex."
"Music is very powerful," Dong said. "Sometimes we cannot explain how powerful the lyrics are to us. The thing about music is that people can construct their own meanings of songs. When they construct an image themselves, they can develop certain behaviors and act on them."
As with the other parts of mass media, shock sells in music.
"Nasty was a dead record until all this [legal action] came up," Luther Campbell, 2 Live Crew's lead rapper, said in an interview with "People Weekly," "then it sold another million copies." That attention also carried over to the group's next album, Banned in the U.S.A., which greatly boosted the record's sales.
Campbell is amused by all the controversy his band drew.
"Fifteen years from now," Campbell told "People Weekly" in 1990, "2 Live Crew will get together for their reunion tour, and the stadium will be filled with black and white doctors, lawyers and politicians."
Maybe his prediction will not become fully accurate - how many people nowadays have even heard of 2 Live Crew or their capers?
Manson is amused by the controversy as well. He told Time Magazine that his band "has always been about pulling one over on the mainstream," though he claims his and his band's antics are still relatively tame.
"If I wanted to be purely shocking, I could do so much more that would really be offensive," Manson said in a Guitar World interview. "I just try to express myself in a particular way that grabs people's attention, but it's never about shock value. It's a vehicle to express myself and get people to listen. There's so much out there to see, you really have to make things powerful in order for them to leave a mark."
"There is a lot of imitation at a young age, and even on into high school," Lewis said. "Kids see people doing things and they imitate it. If they see real people on television shooting other people, they can find a gun and shot someone just by imitation, not necessarily knowing what they are doing."
Indeed, much criticism of violence in the media has been voiced in the recent rash of school shootings. Last Tuesday, a six-year-old boy shot and killed his classmate, allegedly because of a playground spat the two had had the day before. According to United States law, children under the age of seven cannot form intent, so the boy will not be charged with any felony counts. Dong believes the media needs to be careful when reporting stories of minors committing crimes.
"This six-year-old killed his classmate, and the media is saying the boy will not be charged [with any crimes]," Dong said. "That is a strong message. The media needs to be careful when saying something like that. [Kids may] think 'well, if you kill someone, you will not be charged. It must be okay.' No, it's not okay. Someone lost their life. Their whole life is gone."
Part of the reason for this imitation of television, Dong said, is a low level of media literacy. Being media literate means to understand what is being shown on television, read in a newspaper, sang in a song, etc., and to be able to separate right from wrong and fiction from reality.
With reality shows such as "Real TV," "Real World," and "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire;" the evening news; and "fake reality" shows like "Chicago Hope," "ER," and "NYPD Blue;" fiction and reality are being blended together, Lewis said.
"How many people 20 or 30 years ago played Monopoly and mistook it for the real world?" Lewis asked. "Not many. But now, with the blurring of the boundaries between the game world and the real world, where reality leaks into fantasy and fantasy leaks into reality, people may not be able to make the distinction, or not care."
"People do not understand that what they are seeing is fiction," Dong said. "To balance this, we need to do a good job in education, to reach an acceptable media literacy level."
While fingers have been pointed at the media as the cause of society's ills, Lewis said media may or may not be the problem.
"One side feels that the problems out there in the real world are going to be acted out one way or the other," Lewis said, "and that what the media does does not lead people to this aggression, [though] it may give models for ways to funnel aggression. [The Columbine killers] already had their aggression, and just needed something to do with it. They got their models from the media."
"The media says 'we can take responsibility for scenarios that people might follow, but we certainly don't take responsibilities for developing the anger; they would have killed people anyway,'" Lewis said.
Dong agrees that part of the responsibility may lie with the media, but how much responsibility cannot be determined.
"Only when we reach a certain point of media literacy among all people can we broadcast whatever we want," Dong said. "Nowadays [people] don't understand what they are seeing."
But there are always two sides to every story.
"One argument is that violent content in the media is actually beneficial in the sense that [it can be] a safety valve," Lewis said. "If a guy has had a bad day at work, he can come home and beat on his wife and kick the dog, or he can turn on the TV and watch violence."
"The parents need to take control of the situation [of violence on TV]," Dong said. "[They] need to co-view with their children, because if you do not explain things to children, they will not understand. The more we understand, the less likely we are going to imitate behavior."
Manson also believes that a heavy burden falls on the parents to teach their children what is real, and right from wrong.
"Parents should raise their kids to listen to an album and know the difference between reality and fantasy," Manson said to Time.
In mild doses, shock is a very effective tool in society, Lewis said. "The more that shock is effective, the more it links people for action."
The reason doses of shock increase is because of the whole premise of shock. A certain thing is only shocking for so long before people begin to accept it, and when that happens, the next shocking thing will be even more risqué and more outlandish.
"What we're looking at is a process," Lewis said. "If a line is set, and someone steps over the line, it really draws people's attention. But if enough people step over the line, the line of toleration will move, and all the stuff that was once shocking no longer is."
Shock does alter an audience's reaction to their own society, but to what extent is unclear. In the 1800s, women could not show their ankles in public, let alone wear the halter tops, miniskirts and bikinis of today.
"Gone With the Wind" horrified viewers with the word "damn." Many movies now rated PG-13 would have been X-rated when the movie ratings system was first introduced. The computer-nerd movie "Hackers" and "Titanic" both got by with PG-13 ratings despite showing a woman's breast.
So what shocks the most shocking man on earth, Marilyn Manson?
"I get shocked by people smoking cigarettes sometimes," Manson told Guitar World. "I get shocked by watching talk shows. People's mentalities are so far below what I would consider standard. SAT results should be directly linked to a death sentence."
Dong warns that the good points of the media can also be its dangers.
"We can learn from the media," Dong said. "We can learn values, ideals, and beliefs from our parents. Until we are seven years old, parents are the socialization agents. After that, we go to school, and school becomes the socializing agent. The teacher is so important. The parents are still important, but not as important as they are when the child is younger. At around 16 or 17, there is peer socialization influence."
"The media can replace all of that," Dong said. "The media can be the babysitter. The media can be the parental role from very early on. That is very important to understand. We can pick up all these ideas, concepts, knowledge from television. Mass media can play a crucial role in socializing people."