Left Lane
Life, web, and caffeine. By Pat Collins.
DBI: Dead Body Investigation
Published January 19th, 2006As an American, I have become desensitized to death on TV so much that it has reached epidemic proportions. Must so many people die just to entertain me? On shows like CSI and Law & Order I see people being shot, stabbed and thrown off buildings and I wince, only for that perfectly calculated fraction of a second, until a more decent scene comes on the screen.
Consider the facts. I see husbands being killed for cheating on their wives and vice versa. I see crime in poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods. I see kids from all walks of life growing up in abnormal ways that leads to abnormal behavior later on in life. The fact is, our diverse criminal nation is being shown on the television screen, and it’s a scary sight. Is it a strange twist on the reality TV phenomenon?
Maybe the amount of death on TV sends a subconscious message to people watching: don’t take life for granted.
Posted in Entertainment.
Yeah, it seems kind of ironic that here stateside, kids and teens pay $50 a pop for a video game to pretend to shoot somebody… all the while, there are more than three hundred thousand child soldiers around the world being forced into warfare (serving as little more than pawns), having to shoot others – often also their own relatives or friends. Their childhoods are lost now, forever scarred by violence.
But hey, we’re happy over here, because we have our violent video games, movies, and TV.
Oh and, by the way, a fair amount of glim and depressing tongue-in-cheekness is accompanying that above post: I really don’t want to hear arguments for/against violence in video games or television culture.