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Originally Posted by ARTelevision
I do note a high degree of adamant refusal to even discuss the question I posed above. Is there any point at which a culture may become so awash with powerful anti-social messages that it becomes destructive to the continued well being of its population?
I always admire strong personal opinions. I'm not so sure however that many here are thinking of anything besides their own affection for certain forms of media and entertainment. That's not necessarily the same thing as considering the impact of certain types of content and content delivery upon those who may not be so able to separate fantasy from the rest of their lives.
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I feel that, whether or not you follow politics very closely, it can be very difficult to dig through the various agendas, the left and right pigeonholes and the outright lies to find something resembling the stone-cold truth about anything at all. It's much easier to just believe what we're told. Life is too busy to investigate every little bit of information we're assaulted with daily. Our faith in what we hear and see on the television can be downright frightening. Not to mention all the McDonald's commercials every 15 minutes.
In a lot of people (probably all of us) this leads to strong opinions held on completely innacurate information. When presented with accurate information, we reject it. This is the power the media has over us.
I don't know when it began, but there was a point in time when people took a step back and said, "Hey, wait a minute.....I know this guy commited murder, but was it really his fault? I mean, did you hear what they found in his DVD player? And guess what music he was listening to?" In other words, his hobbies and habbits were seen as possibly not being of his own choosing, but rather a result of the media's influence on what he should find enjoyable. The idea that, as a human, he could be influenced in such a way to have something in his DVD player that otherwise he would never have been interested in, and the idea that viewing this material could actually change his perception or behavior patterns is - in my mind at least - accurate but dangerous.
Outside influence plays a role in all of our lives. However, we have a responsibility for what we - as individual humans - say and do. Although there are obvious paralells, I see a very big difference between allowing our political and social views to be shaped by what we see and hear in the media, and doing something extremely damaging to another human or to society as a whole because of these influences. There has to be a point where media influence is no longer acceptable as a reason for murder.
Adultery is often the precursor to murder. That is something I see as a real - not valid, but real - influence. An influence that is very hard to control within one's self. I think that all of us, if we empathize, can imagine how hard something like that would be to deal with on an emotional level. How certain people might not be able to handle the feeling of betrayal and just snap. That doesn't make it acceptable, but we can understand where the influence came from.
Media, on the other hand, should not have that kind of power over someone. And when it does, I tend to find fault in the human who allowed it to be such an intimate part of who he/she is.