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In their book “Grand Theft Childhood,” the authors Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson of Harvard Medical School argue that this causal claim is only the result of “bad or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded, simplistic news reports,.”

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a case that may have the unusual result of establishing a philosophical link between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Plato. The case in question is the 2008 decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals striking down a California law signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005, that imposed fines on stores that sell video games featuring “sexual and heinous violence” to minors.  The issue is an old one: one side argues that video games shouldn’t receive First Amendment protection since exposure to violence in the media is likely to cause increased aggression or violence in real life.  The other side counters that the evidence shows nothing more than a correlation between the games and actual violence.

To begin with, he accuses it of conflating the authentic and the fake.  Its heroes appear genuinely admirable, and so worth emulating, although they are at best flawed and at worst vicious.  In addition, characters of that sort are necessary because drama requires conflict — good characters are hardly as engaging as bad ones.  Poetry’s subjects are therefore inevitably vulgar and repulsive — sex and violence.  Finally, worst of all, by allowing us to enjoy depravity in our imagination, poetry condemns us to a depraved life. Both Plato and Arnheim ignored the medium of representation, which interposes itself between the viewer and what is represented. This very same reasoning is at  the heart of today’s denunciations of mass media.  Scratch the surface of any attack on the popular arts — the early Christians against the Roman circus, the Puritans against Shakespeare, Coleridge against the novel, the various assaults on photography, film, jazz, television, pop music, the Internet, or video games — and you will find Plato’s criticisms of poetry.  For the fact is that the works of  both Homer and Aeschylus, whatever else they were in classical Athens, were, first and  foremost, popular entertainment.

In 1935, Rudolf Arnheim called television “a mere instrument of transmission, which does not offer any new means for the artistic representation of reality.”  He was repeating, unawares, Plato’s ancient charge that, without a “craft” or an art of his own, Homer merely reproduces “imitations,” “images,” or “appearances” of virtue and, worse, images of vice masquerading as virtue.  Both Plato and Arnheim ignored the medium of representation, which interposes itself between the viewer and what is represented.

But what about us?  Do we, as Plato thought, move immediately from representation to reality?  If we do, we should be really worried about the effects of television or video games.  Or are we aware that many features of each medium belong to its conventions and do not represent real life?