Picture Perfect Paranoia

It’s kinda funny how Mainichi Shimbun manages to string together cases of brutal murders in links, then a lot of bloggers seem to come up with their own opinions and observations based on this string of events. See here, here, here, and here.

In my opinion, linking violence to visual media already began even before Jack Thompson became a household name. I think it was way back when pop culture then was “sanitized”, and in the case of our religion here, “purity of mind and soul” makes people think before exposing their selves, as well as ones they know and care about. People live a harmonious way of life, violent acts then viewed as “uncivilized”.

Well, with sanity being thrown out the window and hormonal rushes driving our body after a stressful activity, some humans do tend to be irrational and therefore entices them to do “inhumane acts of violence”. It is with this line of thought, I think, that people may be able to somehow connect the dots, and this is where contentions arise as a result. Somewhere along the line, some groups of people (i.e. soccer moms, zealous religious believers) configure and distort that connection, making it perfectly linear in terms of relationships. Thus, you get the “violent acts = violent media” argument.

Violence is a reaction to negative factors that stimulate animals, like human beings, to a defensive stance. They may range from blocking the point of entry (i.e. covering your face after seeing a bat being hurled and swinging towards your direction) to directing offensive strageties tegies to minimize or eliminate the source of threat (i.e. gunning someone you have enmity with before he has another chance to deal the final blow).

That said, it is somehow disheartening to hear people screaming on the top of their lungs to prevent “various media with themes of violence, murder, and/or death” from being shown in avenues of exposition such as theaters and moviehouses and sold in stores, where a sensible group of people can view them without resorting to “emulating” what they see (the infamous “monkey-see-monkey-do” analogy). Humans are sentient beings with a sense of compassion for their brethren, and simply equating acts of violence to exposure to “various media with themes of violence, murder, and/or death” is something logic, morality aside, cannot accept.

Sources:

• High school boy arrested for slashing violent classmate
• School knew about defamatory comments on Net against boy who committed suicide
• Dumbing Down and Popular Culture
• Cultural Sophistication and Self-Reference On American Television
• Western Culture: Trash, Multiculturalism and Subcultures (Popular Culture)