Video Blames

The horrific mass shootings of the past couple of days are about to enter the well-known cycle of public discourse meant to account for their existence. People have to talk about these events to make sense of them, to account for why they happened, and to make sense of them—that is, to make sure they do not disrupt the normal order of the country. As usual, video games and the internet are taking a lot of the blame. But something is different this time.

Rhetoric—oratory, persuasion, and discussion—is what we as human beings turn to in order to help us make sense of the world around us. This is often what journalists articulate as the "politics" of an issue: the things people are saying that accuse, explain, recount, and the like about an issue. Sometimes we seek out soothing and helpful words in order to cope and move past a tragedy. Sometimes the words seek us out and we can't avoid them. Sometimes we have to articulate how we are not what happened, and no matter what, this is not us.

Rhetorical theorist and cultural critic Kenneth Burke detailed this process in his analysis of scapegoating. Scapegoating is the carving off of a piece of society, identity, or community in order to account for when things go horribly wrong.

Human beings, for Burke, are always working within persuasion. When we find a fact we like, we are attracted to it not because of its objective truth, but because we see ourselves in it. Burke thought that identification rather than fact or persuasion was a better way to look at why human beings believe and speak their beliefs as they do.

Scapegoating is related to identification in the sense that when we identify with something, we inadvertently (or advertently) divide from a number of other identifications. We carve off more than we keep. In the case of scapegoating, we intentionally do some big carving in order to maintain our identification.

The scapegoating happening now is mostly on the presence of electronic forms of entertainment and communication—video games and internet communities (8chan stands in for a lot of them here). I use the phrase "video blames" to sum up what's happening. These new(ish) and unfamiliar forms of interaction are not who we are, not conducive to understanding where we came from, and therefore can be blamed for actions we find (or want to find) outside of how we identify.

Burke identifies two kinds of identification. The first is mortification, where you take the blame in part for some action, and carve off that element of your identity and expunge it. The other is victimization, where you take an element of the group and excommunicate it, arguing that it takes with it all the negative and horrific elements.

In cases of mass shooting there is a mix of types of scapegoating, but normally we pick the victim narrative, the outsider one, where the shooter is someone who is aberrant, they are not who we are, and therefore are not a part of society. We could not have done this; we are not to blame. The mortification form is often what we see liberals take, which is the line that our gun policies and laws make us responsible for it, not an individual. The suggestion of changing the gun policy is the next logical step.

But in the case of El Paso, the website 8chan makes scapegoating very complicated. Remember, the role of scapegoating is to preserve a chosen identification by expunging the elements that interfere with that coherence. In cases like this we don't want to be self critical, we want to blame and find guilty. We don't want to reflect on what role, if any, we had in the horror.

8chan is not an easy identity to dismiss. It is diffuse. And trying to place blame on a diffuse internet group is unsatisfying. Like eating candy it seems pleasurable, seems great, but leaves you with nothing nutritious. There's nothing rhetorically we can use to our satisfaction by blaming a diffuse collective of anonymous statements.

Placing blame on a forum where anything can be argued sounds like a good way to scapegoat, but it isn't satisfying. Blaming the shooter is much more satisfying, except we cannot believe that he just randomly did this. This would implicate almost anyone as being a shooter. Instead, he had bad influences from a place that should not exist. But is an internet forum a place? Isn't it just a bunch of words? The banning of the site won't help much either, I'm afraid.

The discourse of the web security service CloudFlare, which helps websites avoid being shut down through hacker attacks speaks to where this leads us. They stated that they will no longer provide service to 8chan, as they feel it makes them culpable in the discourse that happened there. Of course, CloudFlare was not participating in the content of the server they provided protection to. But they felt responsible primarily because they were making possible a "headless" discourse that ramped up hateful beliefs. They simultaneously believe they should not police the sites they offer services too and that they should build a "better internet." Without the protections that CloudFlare offers, a site like 8chan would be rendered unusable by all of its enemies who don't believe it should exist.

The same is true with violent video games. Far removed from solving a problem, weapons and their use are the problem to be overcome in first person shooters. There's little to no satisfaction in gunning down a store full of helpless, surprised people. There's great satisfaction in skillful engagement. There's a large disconnect here. Seeing videogames as a celebration of senseless violence against other people is to misunderstand what brings people to videogames: powerful vindicating narratives that are complex and uncertain—the same thing that brings them to film, television, and literature. But the scapegoating attempt with video games is similar to that of 8chan—blaming something that is new, unfamiliar, and seemingly unnecessary to society in order to preserve the current order. And that has limits. This isn't promising not to do an action anymore or promising to end a behavior. These choices are much too diffuse to provide satisfying accounts.

Blaming internet chats and blaming video games for the shootings might not work to allow us to preserve our identification. CloudFlare argues that they should only interfere in groups that are "intentionally created as forums for unregulated expression." That does not seem distant enough to work for a sense of mortification or victimization.

The diffuse target for scapegoating might mean that we have to consider our role(s) in mass shootings. What habits, practices, and beliefs do we feed every day that makes the climate of mass shooting possible? What do we do without thinking to others that makes a social climate that fosters such ideas possible?

It doesn't take a lot to realize these questions are abhorrent to everyone. But this might be the point. Defense of our identifications works if it allows them to continue unimpeded. If this halts, the human need to explain will turn on itself. And although I do not believe we, as people or Americans are responsible for the deaths of the people in Texas or any mass shooting, asking ourselves what our role might be is a better step toward healing than blaming an internet chat forum or a video game.

The question is better asked than not. What are we doing that might contribute to this? And if blaming a website or a video game doesn't provide rhetorical satisfaction, it might be just the thing we need to start a process of realizing the mistakes in our identifications and how to mend them to provide a better future for all people, mired as they are in the rhetorical.