By Brett McCracken, TGC. (Image Helena Lopes/Unsplash)
Contemporary digital technology allows us to easily watch videos of terrorists beheading victims and offers the possibility of live streamed executions of terrorists. With a few clicks, we can find a video of whatever sexual fantasy or morbid curiosity our dark heart conceives.
We can use new media for these purposes. But that doesn’t mean we should.
Since the fall, humans have been tempted toward voyeurism. We struggle to resist turning our attention to the lurid, the scandalous, the taboo; our eyes can’t look away from spectacular crashes, whether literal crashes or personal collapses. Maybe gawking feels like a “safe” outlet for our sinful lusts. Maybe fixating on the bad behavior of others is a way we cope with (or deflect from) our own sin. Whatever the reason, we’re darkly captivated by the macabre and sensationalistic.
Modern media companies know this about our nature—and they’re cashing in.
“If it bleeds, it leads” has been a defining principle of the news industry for at least the last half-century. Cable news “breaking news” or local TV news “top stories” gravitate toward the bloodiest and most horrific: mass shootings, house fires that kill entire families, campus gang rapes, fiery 22-car pileups, boys beheaded on waterslides, people flung off roller coasters to their deaths. The gruesome guarantees good ratings. News media prioritizes blood and scandal because audiences can’t look away.
But the thing is, we can look away. Being “out of the loop” on unnecessarily sordid headlines is a choice we can make. We can choose not to be aware of every calamity that happens across the world and every murder trial capturing the nation’s imagination. We can choose not to doomscroll or reflexively turn on cable news as ambient noise in our living room. We can choose to delete apps if we find the algorithm is increasingly feeding our more unwholesome appetites.