Does the immense quantity of bile and hatred expressed on social media predate the platforms? Or have these means of expression conjured a new reality?
Half a century ago (although it now seems to me but yesterday), there was a lively public debate as to whether representations of violence on television and in the cinema conduced to, or even caused, real violence in society. There was at the time great public concern over a rising tide of violent crime that some criminologists insisted, in the lordly fashion that academics sometimes adopt towards the general population, was unfounded.
There were two main schools of thought on the question of the effect of televisual and cinematographic violence: those who thought that such representations of violence acted in a cathartic way, releasing harmlessly everyone’s fixed quantity of violence within, as an incision releases pus from an abscess, thus lessening everyone’s potential for or propensity to real violence; and those who believed, to the contrary, in mimesis, that is to say, that some people—enough to raise the crime rate—would imitate what they saw on film and television.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Law & Liberty
______________________
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Law & Liberty