Opinion
Is Violence Becoming Just Another Scroll?
Breaking through the numbness to reclaim empathy
It’s 1:45 AM. The street outside my window pulses with life. I’m glued to my screen, scrolling through my endless feed.
From time to time, I’d switch apps. Instagram to Youtube, then to X. I go through the usuals. Another ‘graphic’ content, another photo of suffering. Here is a protest turned gory; then a warzone far from what I coin ‘home’.
Images blend together in a relentless salvo of pain and chaos. Today, like yesterday, I’d only stop if my phone ran out of battery, challenging both the feeling of guilt gnawing at me, and sleepiness.
Have I become numb? Has this constant exposure to violence turned me into a passive viewer? The German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt — whom I might have listened to in one of these internet shorts — spoke of the banality of evil.
What about the banality of violence in our digital age? In this monologue, I attempt to untangle my confusion, looking at how I think media exposure is shaping us, numbing us, and eroding our capacity to care.
Violence on phone screens is the antithesis of fiction
Wars, revolutions, and uprisings have all left their sanguinary mark on history. Violence has always been a tool for change, for better or for worse. A shift happened in the 20th century.
Arendt saw it: violence became a spectacle, amplified by technology into a global, gruesome, show. The atomic bomb wasn’t just a weapon; it epitomized a new scale and a new horizon in mass destruction.
Fast forward to today, that spectacle has found a new home: our screens. Violence is packaged, delivered, and consumed in quick, bite-sized clips. American Psycho–meets–Blood Meridian delivered in osmotic doses.
Unlike those powerful books, social media often lets us off easy. Our ‘black mirrors’ serve violence without context, shock without substance. Rough and raw. Unvarnished, yet just as if there was a new style in the making.
We’re left flipping through an album of blurred, faceless images, stories half-told and quickly forgotten. Precisely, the antithesis of fiction.
Isn’t in a bitter irony that the more we see, the less we feel?
In my late night wanderings, I’d keep wanting for more — if this would still count as ‘wanting’ — smashing the ‘See Reel’ button after ignoring the caution for sensitive content.
While they could make us aware, my fear is that social media might be doing the opposite. Susan Sontag warned us in her 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others (I paraphrase): repeated exposure to suffering can numb us. We cannot assume that seeing such images necessarily evokes empathy, Sontag said.
On the contrary, she suggested that viewers might be numbed, turned into inconsiderate voyeurs as they consume images as a form of spectacle. And in this age of endless scrolling, we are at risk of becoming spectators in a theater of horror, where the only thing that changes is the seat, the channel, the app, at the tip of our thumb.
It’s not just the content — it’s its momentum
News renews fast. Too fast. Today’s calamity will be tomorrow’s forgotten post. The digital world runs on immediacy, always in search of the next big thing. But I keep thinking significant change requires focus; and focus is scanty.
I, for sure, know I am losing focus. I remember the Black Lives Matter movement. I see the uprising against the occupation of Palestine. They surge(d) on social media like a wave of collective indignation and hope.
But even these powerful movements face hindrance because of content overflow. I’ve seen dismembered bodies between a cat reel and a summer festival reel. I scrolled on. People scroll on. They burn out. It’s easier to move past a tragedy than to stop and engage.
And can we talk about how violence is framed?
It’s too often black and white. Social media flatten asperities. They turn complex issues into chunks of ‘digestible’ narratives. But violence — our oldest shadow — doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s rooted in forces too deep to be captured in short clips: poverty, racism, inequality, and injustice. Hooks prevail.
It’s the reign of the sensational, of traps set for capturing attention. Not to be judged at first, but then to my exhausted brain, and from a bird’s-eye view, social media starts to look like a field overrun with lures. What depth of truth can 30 seconds really capture?
Am I just another passive consumer?
A couple of days have gone by since the idea of this piece popped in my head. I’ve not failed to scroll through the chaos, that familiar twist of helplessness in my gut. That lived carelessness in my heart.
The violence feels distant, like a bad dream impossible to shake off. In fact, at the core of my monologue lies a question: am I just another passive consumer, numb to the suffering that should spur me to act?
I wished I could share this feeling with my friends. We scroll, we share the posts — sometimes we don’t bother to — , we sign the petitions, but we might just be going through the motions.
Maybe Arendt was right — when violence is trivialized, something strange happens: the impediment of our power to engage. Or maybe not! It is easier, indeed, to watch from the sidelines than to dive in and try to make sense of it all.
But this raises the deeper question of the morality of viewing pain from a distance, which is whether images of violence can lead to meaningful (re)action or simply foster a sense of helplessness or guilt in viewers.
Towards a new viewers acumen
We are stuck in this media-saturated world. We try to make sense of violence that’s… ethereal. We cannot really ignore it, can we? Do we have agency in the face of a risk of numbness? Maybe it is about challenging ourselves to see beyond the images. Developing a new viewers acumen. Imagining that a fragment of reality conceals larger, more complex realities.
Maybe we need a more vigilant approach to the flux of images. At least, that’s what I am working out. It’s a stretch for a probably conditioned mind. The unexpected result is a detour from indifference, at the end of which awaits the reclaim of our empathy.
I am not sure this goes along slowing down. Violence on image still appears to me like a battle field projecting battle fields. My fear is of being doomed to passivity in the face of the world’s violence and human suffering.
Is Social Media numbing our capacity to care? What do you think? Tell us about it on Open Microphone. Submissions below:
