Violence on the screen is nothing new. It produces that shock factor in all kinds of major media outlets; television shows, movies, cartoons.. but does this all come at a cost?

The documentary ‘The Human Behavior Experiments’ explores how people can become swayed in decision making when presented with a strong figure of authority or difficult group dynamic. This film includes clips from the experiments done with Dr. Milgram who had participants conduct a series of electric-shock experiments on a controlled group of people to see how far they would follow his instruction. Milgram says that he conducted such an experiment to gain a better understanding of the Holocaust. In the film, 60% of the participants continued to administer electric shocks to the point of hearing what was perceived as a middle-age man on the other end of the wall screaming out in pain. This reminded me of watching ‘The Stanford Experiment’ where a group individuals was randomly selected to be prisoners and the prison guards and power was quickly abused. This feeds into the controversy today of people in positions of power take advantage of their status and use it to feed their own agenda. Most commonly, people believe that this occurs in law enforcement and government.

The other viewing for this week ‘The Mean World Syndrome’ delves deeply into how violence in the media impacts on the viewer. It was honestly difficult for me to watch some of the violent acts in this film because you almost feel a de-sensitization to these horrid acts of harm and murder by watching them being done over and over again. Scholar, George Gerbner explores specific links between violent acts in the media and how they shape our society’s culture. Topics presented in reality-T.V., movies and even local news outlets are often times presented in a way that make us feel insecure, threatened and question the safety of our environment. It was interesting watching this film as of recently with the election coming to a close and having lived through the coronavirus lockdown. The coronavirus pandemic has targeted fear and instability in so many people and some could say that it’s constant news coverage has caused people more stress that helped people in times of crisis. Even without hearing about complications people face, hospital-horror stories from healthy people who have faced complications from the virus and how we’re expected to utilize new tools in this ‘new normal’, people feel pushed from their pre-existing safe reality. Turning on the news only to see how the job market is crashing and graphics of how poorly the U.S. economy is doing in comparison to being the worst since the Great Depression is unsettling to most.

It’s this brutal honesty that we look for but also want to shy away from. Personally, I’ve never associated the general news as something happy or something to watch to make me feel better. I did however, think it was really interesting to see how watching something so religiously could have an impact on a person’s current reality. I feel like this form of entertainment could almost be worse to people’s psyche’s than watching violent television or movies as we have more control as the viewer in deciding how gory or violent what we watch is.

There have been scientific links between people who view violence and commit it personally. This is because watching it almost normalizes it in their mind and gives them the idea that committing such acts is normal like they saw in the video game they were playing or horror movie they were watching. It’s scary to see how children nowadays spend so much time in-front of a screen playing with a video game device (especially if the games in which they are playing are violent) because they probably have difficulty bouncing back into reality from spending so much time in an alternate one. This is even worse if the video game incorporates using guns and weapons and involves acts of destruction.

My questions for the class are: Do you believe that there should stricter regulations in what we generally put on television?

Do you believe that slander and sensationalism has gotten the best of the modern media?