Violent videos are the new normal, feeding into a rage

The recent instance of a woman being slashed with an axe by her husband while her neighbour filmed the woman’s misery, shows that violent videos have become part of our daily lives.  A cursory look at social media channels from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and WhatsApp shows that real-life violent videos are being filmed, uploaded and viewed with alarming regularity. Indeed, many online news channels are also getting into the act by showcasing not the entire video, but enough of it to titillate the viewer. Judging by the hits, the strategy seems to be working.

Obviously, there are many fallouts to this ‘trend’. The growing consumption of such media is not set to decrease anytime soon. As consumers grow and the Internet penetrates more pockets of the population, the cult is only set to spiral. Today — as Pankaj Mishra points out in his new book, An Age of Anger — people seem to be angrier than ever before, be it online or offline. Growing anger will lead to a spiralling of violence and with that comes a spike in consumption of such social media. But what is alarming is that this widespread consumption is leading to a normalisation of violence.

As people become voyeurs, there is an erosion of empathy and a feeling of distancing of themselves from the victim, leading to what the French philosopher and cultural analyst Jean Baudrillard called hyper-reality. In using this term, Baudrillard argued that reality did not exist but was being recreated through models to create a new reality known as hyper-reality. 

To illustrate his point, Baudrillard wrote an article in the French magazine Libération, where he argued that the first Gulf War of 1991, the first televised war, never existed. This was because the American public, and indeed many of us, experienced the war through a series of hyper-real images which distorted the sense of the real from the imaginary. As people watched it on television, the war became a ‘cyber-game’ with US aircrafts bombing Iraq. Since people sat at a distance and watched all the action and drama on TV, a hyper-real war was created —- the Gulf War did not really exist for them. Its reality was distorted.   

Baudrillard’s theory extended to the power of television some decades ago, but his theory is certainly valid for social media too. What has changed is the degree. While earlier we had hyper-reality enacted for us, today we willingly partake in its creation. Faster editing and distribution of images, the introduction of memes, and the rise of fake news have meant that we are constantly being bombarded with drama; we feel less acutely, and the imagined ‘perfect’ or ‘imperfect’ real is distorting our sense of reality altogether. 

We distance ourselves from the people hurt, injured and dying because through smartphones we have created the hyper-real where the victims — as in the Gulf War — do not exist on the real plane. Also, the smartphone has become a cinema screen for a mini-movie which we want to watch to its end, however graphic. 

This recognition of the notion of hyper-reality is important as it is the first step to recognising that we are not just spreading a culture of violence but also immersing ourselves in it. The result is that our ‘shock-and-disgust’ mechanisms — those of small children to big governments — are being eroded, as we distance ourselves from the reality before us. That there have been so many incidents of real-life violence and people left dying on the streets and in public spaces, without intervention from those around them who have nevertheless thought it fit to capture the moment for social media, is alarming. But it is also a fallout of living in a world where reality is distorted, and violence is normalised so that it does not shock and disgust us in the way it would have earlier.