Recently I started watching The Walking Dead. All of my friends were raving about it, so I figured I would give it a shot. I attempted to watch the first episode a few weeks ago, alone in my dark room. That was not such a good idea. I couldn’t even get through the first episode. However, a few days later, I took a deep breath and started watching this show that is full of the most disgusting images I have ever seen. Once I realized how good the show was though, I could not stop watching.
Almost every five minutes there is a horrid-looking zombie, or brains being ripped out of people’s ears. At first I would just click on to Facebook to distract myself from those scenes, but then I actually started to watch them. And then, I realized that the bloody guts that once made me cringe, were no longer affecting me. I became desensitized to these extremely violent and gory scenes.
I began to think about all of the people who probably go through the same desensitization process that I did. In my opinion, it probably is not a good thing. If there are people who are becoming desensitized to zombie violence, there are definitely people becoming desensitized to gun violence, domestic violence, etc. I think that the group that would be the most affected by this would be children who watch violent television shows. Obviously I love these types of shows, but as a Mass Communication student, I began to think about all of the media effects that violent television could have on people.