Nothing annoys me more than receiving videos through various social media channels that contain scenes of violence. Strangely, such videos go viral in a very limited time. It seems that violence is the buzzword. People appear to, unfortunately, enjoy such videos like an uncle beating young kids, two youngsters engaged in a brutal fistfight, a freak road accident or brutality of some insane terrorist group like Daesh.
Depending on the popularity of such videos, sometimes some of these clips also make it to news channels.
“Violence in the media has been increasing and reaching proportions that are dangerous,” said Emanuel Tanay, MD, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Wayne State University. “You turn on the television and violence is there. You go to a movie and violence is there. Reality is distorted. If you live in a fictional world, then the fictional world becomes your reality.”
Somehow, a lot of us get prone to such level of violence, we feel no problem watching it, we find it interesting to share and talk about. “A large number of viewers watching scenes of decapitation and other horrible practices do not move a muscle. This means they have reached a point where their feelings have been numbed,” said Maha Al-Munif, the executive director of the National Family Safety Program (NFSP) in the Kingdom.
The bad news is that tolerance toward violence does not come without a price. According to many studies in the field of psychology, sociology and criminal behavior, exposure to such kind of violence on different media channels leaves both long- and short- term effects on those watching it.
A study by Bushman and Huesmann (2006), found that exposure to media violence was positively related to subsequent aggressive behavior, aggressive ideas, and anger. “Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists posit that the human mind acts as an associative network in which ideas are partially activated, or primed, by stimuli that they are associated with,” says the study.
“Thus, an encounter with an event or object can prime related concepts, ideas, and emotions in a person’s memory, even without the person being aware of it.”
The tendency to aggression and violence we usually see in public places, sometimes from a negligible stimuli, could all be attributed to the fact that we allow ourselves to be exposed to high levels of violence.
“The psychological processes that link children’s exposure to violence with subsequent increases in children’s aggressive behaviors can be divided into those that produce more immediate but transient short-term changes in behavior and those that produce more delayed but enduring long-term changes in behavior. Long-term increases in children’s aggressive behavior are now generally agreed to be a consequence of the child’s learning scripts for aggressive behavior, cognitions supporting aggression and aggression-promoting emotions through the observation of others behaving violently,” wrote Bushman and Huesmann in their study.
Therefore, to eradicate such violent tendencies in the public, we need both awareness and regulations. The laws that govern cyber crimes in the Kingdom could cover the sharing and distribution of violent videos and photos.
As for awareness, we all have to play our role in this regard. Talk to those sending or sharing violent materials to stop, educate your children about violence and monitor their media consumption. This is the least we could do to promote peace, morals of coexistence and mutual respect.
