Have we become too desensitized to violence?
Photo courtesy of cottonbro studio/Pexels
In the wake of the Evergreen High School shooting and the assassination of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, contextualized by countless mass shootings and rising political unrest in the United States, we at The Lamron have been examining the reactions of others as well as ourselves. As we begin to zoom out from the headlines themselves and look more closely at responses to them, some pressing questions arise: Have we become too desensitized? How should we be reacting to what we see in the media? Are we just overwhelmed, or are we beginning to lose the ability to be truly affected by the violence we see on our screens?
Because such a large swath of the general population— roughly 53%, according to the Pew Research Center—gets their news from social media “at least sometimes,” the role of social media in this conversation is crucial. As we saw in particular with the footage of Charlie Kirk’s death, the speed at which graphic content is spread is staggering and gruesome; violent material quickly becomes ubiquitous. And because of the way algorithms are designed, photos and videos documenting violence of every kind, from fist fights to riots to full-scale genocide, are interspersed with ads, memes, get-ready-with-me videos, ASMR, brainrot, you name it. This kind of psychological whiplash is not only jarring—it’s exhausting.
Witnessing so much content in such quick succession day after day makes it impossible to really cope with so much input and we adapt by becoming desensitized. Although injustice and violence of any kind needs exposure in order to be properly addressed, the effect of so much constant exposure is that it contrarily becomes treated with a kind of casualty that, in its worst forms, cheapens and sells the documented horror of the experience.
Several students commented on how frequently instances of extreme violence (particularly those which result in death) are reduced merely to talking points and fodder for larger agendas with no real interest in the individuals harmed or the systemic issues which facilitate these atrocities.
Gun violence in the United States readily comes to mind, with 326 recorded mass shootings as of Sept. 28 just this year, according to CNN’s tally. Faced with these unconscionable numbers, there remains virtually no actionable change being made to put an end to this gruesome reality. Instead, as one student put it, “...incidents like school shootings and the deaths of political figures have been used not to address reform, but to propagate the cycles of violence which have caused them to take root.”
The question of how we react to violence we see in the media invariably obliges us to address several crucial topics beyond just the scope of the US. Ongoing wars and active genocides are receiving unprecedented amounts of visibility, as social media broadcasts the suffering of those in Palestine, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo directly to our devices. Photos and footage of deaths from air raids, shootings, starvation, asphyxiation are accompanied with calls for aid sent out directly from the individuals and families in danger in an urgent bid for help.
These live accounts are posted on countless social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as major news outlets, fighting the erasure of algorithms and the complacency of many users. Becoming so desensitized to violence in all forms as a result of overexposure to social media, there is a powerful mindset of detachment which allows many users to compartmentalize this violence, as one student observed: “Many of us are very privileged to only see [violence] only on our screens, not in our own lives, so I see many comments online that resemble the thought process of ‘my day-to-day life isn’t impacted by this, so I do not care too much (or at all).’”
The cognitive dissonance as it relates to clearly documented and often routine violence poses a grave threat to our collective conscience. As targeted political violence continues to rise, as mass shootings in the US persist, as wars and genocides unfold with minimal intervention, we must refuse to be indifferent. We must refuse to be jaded, comfortable, or complacent, and instead remind ourselves that what we are seeing is both extremely real and perilously unique in scale and intensity.