Ways in Which the Media Has Desensitized People to Violence

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As I sat in Alexander Hall at Invitation to Excellence, I looked around at the faces as the segment from The Dark Night played. I was struck by the faces of the students in the room—some were amused to an extent and the others were nearly expressionless—as they watched Batman pound The Joker’s head onto a table. The thought “how has the gore of movies desensitized our culture to the violence around them?” ran through my mind as I watched the students, products of our culture’s repugnant media.

Statistics show, according to the American Psychiatric Association, that by eighteen years of age, an adolescent in the United States will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence. These figures are staggering. It would help explain why people slow down their cars when they see a car accident: to them it is only entertainment. Through the media, we, as a nation, are extinguishing the correct emotional responses to the tragedies around us. I heard a story of a man who was sitting in an airport. It was right after the tsunami had struck the coasts of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and many other lands near the Indian Ocean back in 2004. As he sat there, he saw a news station play footage from the devastation in Sri Lanka. After watching the recording for a little while, he looked around he realized that no one seemed to be paying attention to this tragic event. However, right after this a celebrity break up came onto the news station and the man noticed how everyone’s attention was quickly attentive to the story. As a nation, Americans have become desensitized to the violence all around them; it is only entertainment to them.

By making violence a form of entertainment we have become nihilistic in a sense. The violence found ...

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... movies with violent acts of murder repeatedly; they think that seeing this carnage before them does not affect them. However, they are wrong. They become calloused and unable to sympathize with the hurt and pain around them. They may find that it is hard to understand how to cope with a death when you have used death for entertainment for so long.

There are certainly other ways that the media has desensitized people to violence, I have only scratched the surface of this question. Yet, I believe that is necessary that someone looks into it deeper, because if not we are still in the predicament of making light of death and life itself. Something has to change where next time a see a violent scene with other teenagers, they would look away or something in them would click that what they are viewing is right, that they would stop just staring right back at the screen.

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