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From: Staneslav the pechenye eater
Date: 24 Sep 2002
Time: 22:25:26 -0500
Remote Name: 68.98.249.181
Our beloved professor asked which causes more desensitization, literature or television when it comes to violence. Since graphic representations of violence are seemigly rare in literature as opposed to tv, I feel that it is safe to say that television does the majority of desensitization in american culture. But is television causing more desenitization per capita than literature? That is a harder question to answer, to which some of you are saying, duh, that was the original question. I feel the best way to tackle this question is from a cognitive (mental processing) psychological view. To know which of the two stimuli has a greater effect, one must know how it travels through the mind. Assume that you are a five year old child who has never been exposed to any type of violence. Also assume that this child has no idea how a firearm works. If the child reads or is merely told that someone is shot, there is less understanding and trama than if this innocent child saw someone shot in person. The reason for this is obvious, the child has not had enough experience to understand what he was told to create a mental image of it in his mind. But we aren't all five forever. So what happens to an older person who knows exactly what a bullet can do, and what it looks like. If this person sees someone shot on tv, the only thing that person can do is turn off the tv. The image has already been processed by the brain, and there is no way to prevent desensitization from occuring. However, if the same person is reading Babel, and gets to a point in the literature where things are getting uncomfortable, they can stop reading. There is a difference between understanding the words and knowing what happened and recreating the scene in your mind. In essence, there is nothing forcing an uncomfortable image into the mind against a person's consious will. This would be different if instead of violence we were talking about profanity. But since we are talking about violence, I believe that a visual presentation of violence is more desenisitizing than a literary one because a description of the violence does not nessecarily force the creation of an image in the mind, and a literary presentaton can be terminated at will by the subject as soon as it becomes uncomfortable. A literary presentation allows the brain to filter an creation of an image as a person sees fit, while no choice can be made when it is seen directly.
Staneslav