Yes, I know that’s a rather cryptic headline, but just one minute, and I’ll explain…
In one of my articles on the site, I referred to an eye-opening classroom experience that former teacher John Andrew Murray wrote about in Teachers in Focus magazine. It’s worth repeating here.
Murray was teaching English at a private American school and he was using the old television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents to spice up his weekly lessons on plot development. After a few weeks, he decided to stop the show before the end and let the students write their own endings. The kids liked the idea so much that they wanted to read their work aloud in class.
Murray was happy to agree, but after the first three or four students, he put a stop to the reading aloud. Why?
Because what the teacher has heard had horrified and sickened him.
Once he had recovered a little from the initial shock, he began to discuss with the youngsters the highly explicit imagery of violence he had found in their papers. They insisted that media violence didn’t affect them because, after all, the graphic scenes they saw on TV and the movies were “fake.” Murray then asked them how they would feel if they saw a dog on TV getting riddled with bullets.
“How horrible!” they cried out in unison.
Murray concludes that unlike the human carnage they regularly witness on TV, his pupils found animal deaths appalling precisely because they had seldom seen it.
For the first time, they realized how desensitized they had become to violence.
Now you’ll perhaps understand why I refer to the media (and I use the word in the very broad sense: newspapers, magazines, books, TV, computer games, email, Internet, the works…) as the anesthetics of modern society.
It’s a funny thing. When I was a little younger, a major function of the ” press”, as it was then called – a term later largely replaced by “the media” to embrace more modern forms of communication – was perceived to be a public watchdog against corruption and social injustice. In other words, a red flag, a siren to rouse you from your slumber, to alert and sensitize you to communal and social maladies that need addressing.
Hopefully, the media, or part of it, still serves that role. But we see from the above story how the media can do exactly the opposite.
We see, in fact, a numbing effect that can really put us to sleep.
In my next post, please G-d, we’ll examine whether the power of this anesthesia is confined to our natural aversion to violence and similar phenomena, or whether its effects reach further to far more subtle areas.
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