I was in my ‘True Lies: Documentary Studies” lecture as we skimmed over the way that in the past, people would become scared of moving images and run out of the cinema as a reaction to what they were seeing on the screen. I began to think about how that differs from the way we interact with media today, and one word in particular came to mind; ‘desensitisation.’ But then suddenly something clicked in my mind, they are desensitised to the medium, not the content.

It has been argued that children are more violent due to violent video games and television shows (which is complete nonsense, by the way) as they are able to play/ watch this content without being scared or emotionally affected. But that would only be true if we were back in the days where people would run out of movie theaters. Children are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for, and they know that what is on the screen is not actually real, unlike the people watching those first motion picture films. And that is just the effect that media has on our perception of reality. We find ourselves less emotionally affected by what we see on the news than the situations we experience first hand, because although we know the event is real and affects a lot of people, i have a theory that we subconsciously separate ourselves from it, because we have learned that what in the screen isn’t really there.

Just a thought…