Mass Shootings: Part 3 - The Things We See

Before the bodies of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and their victims turned cold in Colorado, public discourse turned toward media. As the police and the general public combed through every corner of the killers’ lives, they discovered a decidedly dark entertainment diet. The boys were fans of the rock musician Marilyn Manson, and spent countless hours playing the first-person shooter game Doom online. They made videos of themselves clad in black trench coats carrying weapons, addressing the camera in the manner of the murderous protagonists of Natural Born Killers, one of their favorite films. There were of course many teenagers in the 90s who enjoyed a similar dark and irony-laden media diet and never went on to commit acts of violence — I myself was among them. But Harris and Klebold were influenced by a popular culture that had come to present detachment and cynicism and nihilistic anger as virtues within much of its content. And it was here that some of those left bewildered in the wake of the slaughter at Columbine began to look for answers to the unanswerable.

A counter-narrative soon developed that made blaming mass media out to be a backwards reactionary attack launched by the natural enemies of that same entertainment complex - evangelical Christians, Republican agitators, and generally anyone not on board with a loosening of content controls that had been accelerating for a couple generations. People like Tipper Gore who campaigned for some kind of pushback against a poisoned media culture were ridiculed and cast as the same kind of square that would have finger-wagged the girls watching Elvis on television in the 1950s. And they leveled this ridicule without taking time to really think about whether some of that anxiety in the 50s may have been for good reason.

During the 1950s the percentage of American households with televisions went from 10% to nearly 90%. Toward the end of the decade, the programming that filled all these screens changed from Broadway-style teleplays to a wave of “edgier” content — westerns, sitcoms, police thrillers, and soap operas. There was concern about the more explicit nature of this new brand of entertainment that Americans were beaming into their brains an average of five hours a day, during which viewers were now witnessing many dramatized killings across dozens of programs. But at least those averse to the loosening of onscreen decency could turn to mega-popular mainstays like quiz shows for more wholesome and trustworthy entertainment — at least until 1959, when perhaps the first major television scandal revealed that most of these quiz shows were fixed. The disillusionment in the wake of that scandal led to greater skepticism about what television producers were up to, and what effect all this cheating and violence and vulgarity was having on the population. What that analysis seemed to settle on — and which remains the prevailing attitude — is that this new medium was at best a vehicle for cultural junk food. At worst, its content may be something toxic to the American mind.

In the 60s and 70s, the movies took their own turn toward the antisocial and nihilistic. As the old studio system fell apart — a system that had its problems but which at least acknowledged the moral framework of the traditional American viewer — a new wave of filmmakers put forth entertainment that reveled in the destruction of preexisting social and moral systems. Films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Cool Hand Luke glorified criminals and dropouts as reasonable reactions to an oppressive ruling culture. The “hip rebel” became a mainstay in American entertainment, and it quickly moved beyond stories like Rebel Without a Cause — where James Dean’s rebellious ne’er-do-well actually breaks free from nihilism and returns to stable family life — to Bonnie and Clyde's romanticized slow-motion obliteration of the beautiful Warren Beatty and Faye Dunnaway at the hands of square cops who were just ragging on a good time.

Profound as it was, the proliferation of television and the rise of antisocial cinema were but a prelude to the all-devouring leviathan of the Digital Age. Whatever defense attempted to stem the tide of violent and sexual and sexually violent content — from new movie ratings to ID requirements at video stores to timeslot regulations for adult TV programming — all of them looked like small rocks stacked against the tidal wave of content brought about by digital.

Adolescents who for decades had been forced to search their fathers’ closets for old Playboys now were able to view thousands of sex acts before adulthood, many of them graphic depictions of abuse and degradation. By the late 90s, file sharing networks allowed children to view videos of beheadings and rapes and animal torture more easily than it would be for them to purchase cigarettes at the corner store. As this horse charged out of the barn, all the rhetorical scaffolding that had defeated so many attempts to reign in the excesses of television made it all but impossible to do anything about it. In the case of the file-sharing networks, only copyright law seemed able to bring them to heel for a while. An issue of licensing, not one of moral disintegration.

And then the social media age commenced in the 2000s. The internet was no longer a simple content repository or chat platform - it was now a global stage for the reconstruction of the self. What began as the relatively low-fi network curation provided by desktop Facebook moved into mobile, where it could stay with people every waking moment of the day. The psychic territory occupied by digital became damn near total. The addictive scrolling facilitated by mobile removed much of the mental peace that people had experienced for large chunks of their day throughout history. And the algorithms created by the new tech overlords were not at all interested in slowing things down.

Tik Tok, for example, relies on an algorithm that facilitates instantaneous feedback and reinforcement actions. It will read how long you view a video and then trigger a cascade of content that loops ever deeper toward that which triggers your sight reactions most acutely. Humans being what they are, this means a firehose of material that fries the dopamine receptors and dumbs down complex topics into shallow and self-aggrandizing bites that can be quickly reinforced or swapped out. Not to mention the live strip shows put on by psychologically fragile teenage girls and the anonymous men who “tip” them via Cash App.

The result of all this is a real-time psychic fracturing across the entire culture. Consumer capitalism, made so much more powerful by digital, encourages the constant breakdown and reformation of different identities as a means to deliver product to suit each new identity. And of course the young, whose personalities are striving to form into a coherent whole amidst a hurricane of content pulls, constitute an ideal target — their spiking rates of suicide and depression and anxiety are testament to the casualties. Millions of people split apart and stitched together again and again in a digital hurricane where triggers are measured in nanoseconds. Rooted meaning abandoned, foundations cracked apart. It stands to reason that some minds would break — or that some would to seek to smash through the digital meta-haze to assert themselves in the most catastrophically real ways imaginable.

While it may be difficult to draw direct lines between an act of nihilistic mass violence and the viewing of a particular movie or internet video, the idea that the most rapid shift in both the nature and volume of human media consumption in the history of the world has had no effect on the social psyche is absurd. It took centuries for societies to even begin to get an idea of what the printing press had done to their moral frameworks and collective consciousness.

We’re a mere thirty years into the Internet.