I wrote this as a practice essay for the GRE; please forgive the fleeting references and discussions. Half an hour is not a lot to plan and write.

The extent to which the media, broadly understood, has pervaded our lives is hard to estimate with precision, but there is no denying that in recent years our lives have been increasingly proliferated by all forms of media, from the ubiquitous push notification warning one of an unopened notification to the rising popularity of video games. Fake news and deepfakes pose new thA Shreats to our understanding of the world like few other things have before, and this past summer, in the midst of a viral pandemic, cities in the United States, most prominently Portland, burnt under the brunt of violent protests. Increasing violence has been part of our public discourse for some time now, and it is hard to deny that it is having an outsized influence on today’s youth, who are faced with increased normalisation of violence and exposure to graphic violence at rates never seen before. I seek to argue that while the media consumed by a majority of today’s youth has accepted violence and representations of it as normalised, finding good role models among one’s peers and parental group can assist in alleviating this.

The increasing normalisation of violence is deeply unusual and counterproductive for any society that seeks to raise healthy children. In 2016, a Facebook live stream, seen by many hundreds of thousands of people, showed an African-American man from Cleveland shoot himself in the temple with a gun whilst streaming it live on Facebook. That livestream was available to watch for many days after the event, with Facebook refusing to moderate it until a hue and cry forced them to do so. But they did not learn — in 2020, two separate events in a similar vein were streamed live on Facebook and TikTok, another social media platform frequented by children and teenagers; both sites took no action. We spend more time on social media than on any other media scape, and this sphere is being increasingly shaped by the action, or the lack thereof, that it takes when faced with representations of violence. The lack of parental controls does not help. The documentary ‘Social Dilemma’, streaming on Netflix, points out that these social media firms rely on controversy and subtle psychological manipulation to influence users to use their platforms more; as the discussion following this will illustrate, they will capitalise on the influence of video games and other forms of media that seek to normalise violence.

While this might seem to be the complain of a modern luddite, it cannot be denied that video games have influenced entire generations’ perceptions of violence, adding to the impact of social media. The immensely popular game series ‘Grand Theft Auto’, which has run over five iterations till this date, is based on the premise of thieving and conniving to murder and commit all sorts of violent activities — and for what? For the sake of the entertainment of the player. First Person Shooter games (FPS) such as the ‘Call of Duty’ series contribute to the gamification of play: war and violence is now merely a game with a button that must be pressed, and with no human cost to it. By making the use of violence appear to be a harmless, and even entertaining game, these pernicious video games have contributed to our understanding of violence as a force that hurts no one: we have become desensitised to it and immune to all the hurt it can cause. When children think of violence as a game, they are unlikely to think of the moral consequences of their conduct.

By reducing violence to a normal activity that has been largely desensitised, we remove from our children the opportunity to think effectively about why they act the way they do, and we turn them into mindless zombies who find wanton death and destruction gratifying and not horrific. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt was reporting from the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal and architect of the Final Solution that led to the Holocaust systematically killing over six million Jews, she noted something about the nature of evil that we see recurring in our youth today: Eichmann had a blank expression and like other Nazis merely claimed that he was following orders. Arendt famously called this the ‘banality of evil’: evil is found in mundane actions and largely passes off as ‘business as usual.’ By showing our children that gratuiotious violence and murder does not hurt anyone, we have endeavoured to raise a generation of young thugs and warmongers, not a generation of principled gentlemen. We have turned the horrific into the banal for them, and we must remember what the philosopher Aristotle has to say about this: we do not do anything that we think is wrong. The present generation of children finds nothing wrong in perpetrating violent acts for pleasure. Dare I say, this desensitisation will make our children accept degrees of violence that we have never seen before as appropriate, and will support violence as not just the means to an end but as an end in itself.

While children’s peer groups are important remedies to this malaise, they have not been left unscathed: gaming has now become a social activity. Instead of playing on the street or going to play a sport, the children of today find solace in the television and the gaming console. I see this in my younger sister, whose undue attachment to her PlayStation is rather surprising. Research shows that on aggregate, exposure to such forms of media have pushed individuals to experience more pronounced mood swings and seek comfort not in the world outside but in the confines of the screen. Parental role models are important, especially when children are impressionable, and they can be a powerful influence on behaviour if they are introduced at the right age and the right time. But they are the exception and not the norm: violent media has become so ubiquitous that few adults have the time to broach these subjects, lay down guidelines, and actively enforce them. To raise a child takes a village, it is said, but when the village is entrapped in a never-ending cycle of work and chores, the leisure required to dedicate oneself to adaquetly rearing a child is scarce. Therefore, it must be stated that until exposure to violent video games and social media is reduced and positive affirmations are provided: reading, writing, thinking, playing a sport, for example, there will be no reprieve, no abatement of this moral pandemic.