A poll

I'm gonna ask a multiple choice question poll here and make a graph of your answers. Answer honestly! what are your thoughts on desensitization to violence of society as a whole by media? A: I have been notably desensitized myself B: I have not, but loved ones or friends of mine have been desensitized C: I don't personally know anyone who's been desensitized by media, but I believe it is an issue D: I don't believe in media desensitization

I think the concept of desensitization is probably too simplistic. Fake violence is not like real violence, and recorded violence is not the same as witnessing it in person. The way you are "supposed" to react to seeing death, gore and aggression doesn't necessarily match the baseline reality either. Maybe to some extent media desensitization as a concept is a way for people to excuse themselves or those close to them for failing to respond with appropriate dismay. Maybe becoming inured to it all is a natural part of growing up, and people look for tangible causes where there is only passive change. We can probably test this though, at least as relates to non-fictional violence; a person on the internet today is much less likely to see it than they may have been years ago. LiveLeak is dead. People don't know what three guys one hammer is. Things are much more censored. Has that produced results? Are the younger generations more empathetic, more capable of shock and grief? I think I'm pretty desensitized at least to gore and death but if it has a cause I'd blame it more on all the short lived pets I kept and all the animals I saw the family cat kill as a child, than on the media I consumed. That cat kept bringing me baby rodents he had orphaned, and I felt strong emotions motivating doomed efforts to save them. But with each failure I felt a little less. I didn't stop trying but I did stop hurting. The reality is that living things suffer, stop moving, become unliving objects that are consumed and fall apart. It happens every time and you can't stop it, it happens on a scale too big to imagine, it will happen to you and everyone you care about. I don't know if understanding that is good or bad. If I had to pick an option though I'd go with D

I'll go with A Akin to >>35124 , I believe context is important here. Of course, If I we're to witness it first hand, or hear about it from my community, tough pill to swallow. On the other hand, just seeing it online thru a recording or picture doesn't really do anything other than for the shock value at first. The kind that makes you go "Ooooo~ Yup that'll hurt, alright?". BUT! I won't go as far to not believe it. I heard some sad folk claim they don't feel anything after being exposed to this kind of extreme content for a while and seeing it themselves. Rare cases, I know, but existing ones that may suggest media desensitization exists. At least if media desensitization doesn't exist, I wonder if the inverse doesn't exist either...

I'm sure we all have to some extent. It's a hard thing to objectively measure.

i used to be desensitized but that was when i was media-oversaturated making hundreds of tumblr posts a day, then i stopped consuming media altogether and went to the forest to meditate, also experienced real violence which changed my whole perspective. i think it can be a healthy release, if you think about it on an evolutionary timescale, for hundreds of thousands of years we went around raping and killing absolutely everything in sight with no consequenes. that is still a very strong program / stage we all pass through during maturation. we use that part of ourselves every day to get stuff done. it is only very Very recently that we developed access to the prefrontal cortex, neocortex, basal-ganglia bridge, which in part regulates complex cooperate social strategies, inhibit those previous impulses, and allows for national-scale cohesion on projects like atomic power and spaceflight to occur.

I worry sometimes people are growing more sensative to it. Look around, there's people who can't even (so they say) stomach beef because of violence. People who espose disgust and astonishment at executions for vile crimes, a common occurence throughout history, even a spectacle. Have we repaced real executions and public lashings, with silly violent movies ? I think that's a step away from normalization of violence. During the US civil war people went out on picnics to watch battles. Think about that. My parents generation saw regular vietnam war footage on television all through their childhoods. If you think media has just recently started glamourizing violence, I dont know what to tell you. Ever read the Illiad ? King Arthur ? Beowulf ? Seriously any nation's mythology or the Bible? Considered how many of the great figures of history from any great length of time ago seem associated with violence, Caesar, Alexander, Khan and Napoleon, the list goes on and on and on. You've even got terribly famous women like Joan of Arc in the same category, so its not even a male thing. The best selling novelist of all time, Agatha Christie, churned out books about murder like nobodies business. Not not all famous people have blood (fictional or otherwise) on their hands, but its indisputeable that there's a long running human fascination with violence and the violent.

>>35291 >People who espose disgust and astonishment at executions for vile crimes, a common occurence throughout history, even a spectacle. There have always been such people. Public executions were really more to threaten the populace into submission and to allow the public to verify that notorious criminals really were dead, I think only a few people really thought of them as entertainment. Gladiatorial fights are much better example of real violence being used as entertainment. >During the US civil war people went out on picnics to watch battles. They did that for literally only the first battle, and they were all shocked partly because the North didn't win, partly because it was much more bloody than they thought it would be. >but its indisputeable that there's a long running human fascination with violence and the violent. indeed. However I think that, generally, there is a significant difference between the heroic, and often abstracted, violence that we depict in our stories and real violence. Most people don't have the stomach to fight, but most people do have the stomach to watch someone else fight (or to hear the fantastical retelling). OP: I think that there is a general desensitization to emotion that happens when you spend most of your time mentally immersed in a fantasy world where the stimulus is totally different from real life (the wired and/or video games). However I think this generally manifests as either extreme sensitivity to violence or a sort of detached cynicism, and it rarely carries over to actual violence. Being desensitized to actual violence is much more serious, and it describes most of the gangsters and killers you hear about on the news.

I don't think I'm desensitised at all. I wonder if it's real or if it's not more of a social pressure. People who view themselves as desensitised often posture like they have one over on people who are sensitive. Like they are somehow a superior person because they can look at rotting corpses or burst into laughter at movie shock gore. It's really weird. This world is weird in general. Where it almost feels like making yourself as unchildlike as possible even to the point of corruption is something to glorify. I don't like to watch violent movies. I don't understand how people watch movies without feeling empathy for anyone who isn't a protagonist. Like in an old action movie where we see innocents die viscerally but the end is still considered happy because the protagonist killed yet another person and kissed a girl at the end. In addition I tear up easily to many things. I don't see why this is something to be ashamed of but I've often had people try to make it seem like there's something wrong with me because of that I don't know. Maybe society has conditioned us to all be children yet avariciously vying for the trappings of adulthood. It's not enough to just know that death exists. I need to be able to look at all the most gruesome horrors possible with a smile and anyone who can't do that is less than me.