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The Copycat Effect
How The Media and Popular Culture Trigger The
Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines
by Loren Coleman
Paraview Pocket Books - Simon and Schuster,
2004, 308 pages
COPYCAT EFFECT BLOG!
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Review of
The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular
Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s
Headlines
Loren Coleman
Paraview Pocket
Books, Simon and Schuster, 2004
(www.CopycatEffect.com)
Review by Joan d’Arc
Paranoia, Fall 2005 |
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Many people know
Loren Coleman as a Fortean researcher, author of
books on Mothman, Sasquatch and the Yeti, but
many don’t know he is also a specialist in child
welfare and youth suicide prevention. In fact,
he wrote a book in 1987 called Suicide
Clusters and was on the Larry King show
discussing suicide clusters long before his
colleagues had noticed them.
Coleman blames continued violence in society on
sensationalized murders and suicides in
newspapers and on television. According to
Coleman, the media’s attitude is “death sells.”
I talked to Loren from his home in Maine about
why he wrote this book.
Coleman tracks a string of events that inspired
suicide clusters among teens during the 1980s
and 90s. Why a young person takes their life may
never be known, Coleman states. But there are
underlying social patterns that may help us to
understand, to prevent, and to intervene. Indeed,
Coleman predicted (on March 18, 2005) that we
should be prepared for a wave of school
shootings between March 20-April 20. On Monday,
March 21, the Red Lake, Minnesota, school
shooting occurred. Coleman says he has a “keen
sense of trends and forecasting,” and he set out
to apply that sense of foreboding to his
research in The Copycat Effect.
Is Loren Coleman psychic? No, but he reads human
behavior well, and he wanted to use The Copycat
Effect to convey just how obvious the hints in
the media are. For instance, the copycat effect
made him aware that high school coaches may be
targeted in school shootings, and that religious
cults or churches may have “mass suicides” or
“shooting rampages” this spring. He says he
wrote Copycat because it became clear that the
media can and does trigger such events.
Should we turn off TV and go outside and play
with our children? Well, it wouldn’t hurt, but
censorship is not the answer, says Coleman. He
believes the media can be a positive tool to
spread social change. Besides, he adds, turning
off the TV is a “negative solution that would
only backfire with the youth of today,” who love
their iPods, video games and email. Indeed, he
admonishes, we must not overreact.
He explains, “Our society has been conditioned
to like violent movies with lots of action, to
enjoy breaking news with car chases, hostage
situations, murder trials and school shootings.”
Being aware and informed is OK, he says, but
it’s the “overwhelming graphic images that
trigger mayhem.” Consumers need to say “no more”
and the media need to pull back and be
responsible.
Is there a dark objective to this media
conditioning? Coleman believes the motive is
more overt: selling shows, SUVs and soap. But
the result is the same: “the copycat effect
triggers violent events in a predictable pattern
that follows a media-driven timetable (same day,
3-4 days, one week, one month).” Now that’s hard
data.
As far as Coleman is concerned, the copycat
effect is real and he has set out to document
the causal connections. We all know that
violence begets violence, but this is a
remarkable book that details very precise
connections between violence in media and
violence in the world.
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