The post How much of violence still shock us? appeared first on KanglaOnline.com.
By Tinky Ningombam
What is more repulsive? Watching gladiators fight in movies or being a witness to mob violence on the streets? When we as a generation look at our outlook and reception to the concept of violence, it reflects a lot on why we can believe that the end of the world is not a tough presumption to take after all.
World Health Organization defines violence as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against a person, or against a group or community that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, mal-development or deprivation.
And however much we do not like it, violence has more or less been an indispensible element in the society. The animalistic instinct of “survival of the fittest” is already suggestive of the idea of violence. And our civilizations and societies are built on the use of violence either social or institutional. “When violence is exercised by oppressed or dominated groups in society against the legally established order with the goal of bringing about social change, it is termed social violence. When violence is exercised by dominant groups through the government apparatus against subordinated classes in order to maintain the status quo, it is termed institutional violence.” (CIDCA Study 1980; Antonio Cassese 1991)
In short we have witnessed certain types of violence that are loosely clubbed in the following list.
1. Social Violence
2. Institutional Violence
3. Collective Violence
4. Interpersonal Violence
As seen, I have deliberately kept away from the idea of intellectual violence. But man as a social being have exercised at least one or more of the 4 types of violence as described above.
Censor systems have upped their radars on the increasing media coverage of violence in real lives. But we should know that this increased detailed reportage of violence in Media has been a result of the growing amount of tolerance of the idea of violence. A direct result of the society’s accepted norms in understanding the underlying implications of the various types of the violence and how people place their realistic expectations on it. With the boom in free flow of information, open communication will simultaneously increase. Though there are certain protocols for best practice reportage and awareness of people’s personal sentiments; which means not crossing the threshold of “grossing” people out with too many details on gory and crime.
But looking at it, we seem to have accepted violence as a part and parcel of life. Cultural upbringing, ethos and social structure are fundamentals in this creation of systems and implications. Take a look at the amount of shock factor in horror movies or the nature of gory and bloodshed in new-age action movies, the violence in video-games, online games… all of which exemplify the gradual tolerance towards it and the “matter-of-fact-ness” of the situation. The depiction of death and fatalities in video games for instance is a real example of how tolerant the younger generation are becoming to the idea of pain and violence. And while the action hero killing or beating up the evil warlord is shown as “good violence,” this shows the interesting dichotomy between people’s perception of the so-called “good” and “bad” varieties of violence; which hence eventually means that the person/thing who/which has the higher power in the equation in any relationship, be it interpersonal or intrapersonal gets to choose, in metaphorical terms, the lesser of the two “evils” per se. And we are left with the idea of “acceptable” violence and “non acceptable” or “criminal” violence.
The threshold of tolerance for violence has increased day by day, where we have come to take information on killings,bombings, shoot-outs as common jargon. We are no longer as scared of guns, bombs, tanks or bunkers. We have started accepting them as normal, at least most of us. And with certain instances where violence is correlated to notions of “manlihood”, “glory”, “strength” and “victory”, the parameters become more complicated. This hence presents an interesting take on how we observe and react to the idea of violence in our day-to-day lives culturally, politically, psychologically or socially.
Therefore, we see a paradoxical situation where in some ways the openness in the discussions of violence is a good take on realism, on the other hand, we become more tolerant to increased levels of violence. And the parameters of “excessive violence” or “higher levels of violence” become an arbitrary valuation dependant on the society’s reaction to it. Because, either for a good cause or not, violence is violence after-all. And we cannot overlook this.
(The columnist believes that adult supervision and guidance is crucial in educating children on the idea of violence. Psychologists have vouched that proper mitigation on critical media viewing can help children not to glorify or misinterpret forms of violence.)
The post How much of violence still shock us? appeared first on KanglaOnline.com.
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2012/12/how-much-of-violence-still-shock-us/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-much-of-violence-still-shock-us