Cultural violence takes place because violence has undergone an internalization process over a long period of time. Violence manifests in various forms in social, cultural and political and political life.
By
Idi Subandy Ibrahim
·5 minutes read
SALOMO TOBING
Idi Subandy Ibrahim
These days, the phenomenon of violence and violent shows is like the hot air pollution of our lives, as we enter the 21st century. Even though violence is as old as human civilization, only at the turn of this century has an abundance of visualization of violence freely flooded private spaces, such as through television and various social media.
Technology and digitalization of the media makes floods of violent information into a menu of entertainment dishes within grasp in the family room. Events outside of humanitarian reasoning, ranging from student harassment, violence in schools, rape, shooting, planned murder, acts of robbery in broad daylight, acts of thuggery and terrorism, mutilation and chain murder, to violence against animals, are provided in detail, repeatedly and distributed freely on social media.
Violence is like a nightmare! Our conscience is tapped to ask: Why, for reasons that look unimportant, do people so easily hurt each other and even eliminate lives? Why does a nation that sees a smile as cheap, see a human life as equally cheap?
In an increasingly stressed society and amid weak application of laws, violence becomes language or means of speech among humans. Violence can even be the foundation of the existence of a person, group, or a local, national and global regime. Violence becomes cultural legitimacy: The life of the culture of violence becomes cultural violence, to borrow the words of Johan Galtung.
Violence manifests in various forms in social, cultural and political and political life. Call it, for example, in the field of education and culture, uniformity is violence against differences: rape of the potential for the diversity of students' creativity. Uniformity kills the wealth of human talent, God's grace from birth.
Violence in the world of education can also manifest in the form of educational-commodification policies that create the loss of opportunities for talented children from poor and underprivileged families to enter the world of high-cost education. The loss of access to education is violence against the principle of justice that is contrary to the basis and philosophy of our country.
Violence manifests in various forms in social, cultural and political and political life.
Cultural violence can be felt even though it is invisible, but it can also be seen even though it is not felt directly. Cultural violence takes place because violence has undergone an internalization process over a long period of time. No wonder the media frequently says that violence in the media is only a mirror of violence that has lived in the culture of society.
Some time ago, various circles were shocked over the shooting incident that killed a police officer, and then the details of the news of violence in the incident almost reached the saturation point.
The tragic event knocked on our conscience. Is this incident only a symptom of copying like the incidence of violence that is widely aired through spectacle-product imports from the superpower?
For more than 60 years, social scientists have examined the effects of media violence, including TV programs, films, video games, lyrics, music videos and the internet. They found evidence of three different impacts of media violence. First, the audience effect. The more media violence you see, the more insensitive you are to violence in the real world. Second, the aggressor effect. The more media violence you see, the more aggressive you will be. Third, the effect of the victim. The more media violence you see, the more afraid you are to be a victim of violence.
Various studies have shown that exposure to media violence contributes to increasing sociocultural violence. On the one hand, media violence is believed to increase aggression, marked by a decrease in human sensitivity to the effects of real violence. Media violence initially produces fear, disgust, anxiety and the motivation to avoid it. On the other hand, repeated exposure to media violence reduces its psychological impact and ultimately produces motivation and leads to the increase in one's aggressiveness.
The violence industry in the digital era commodifies the acts of aggression in various games and spectacles with violent nuances. Competition in viral-oriented news tempts some media by the logic of violence tabloidization, violence as a real spectacle and fiction/fantasy increasingly dominating public space. Crimes and war become entertainment (“horror-tainment”) during the main broadcast time, fill leisure time and crowd the gadget's messages. Comedy that is about to entertain does not infrequently contain the aggression of prejudiced words against women, people with disabilities and lower-income communities (helpers, security guards, drivers, scavengers, sweepers, etc.) as mockery.
Of course, every form of barbarity is slicing our conscience of justice and humanity. Why is violence still happening when it is the principle of humanity that is just and civilized that we want to be carrying as the character of Indonesian people? The view of the father of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1922) regarding "active instincts [human] to hate and damage" is like legitimizing the roots of human civilization’s violence.
Every form of barbarity is slicing our conscience of justice and humanity.
Communication psychologists have long worried about the effects of media violence, such as the loss of sensitivity, imitation or socialization (dissemination of information). After years of researching violence in various media, in School for Violence (1964), Fredric Wertham emphasized that in the end, the media trains young people not only to become a "peace corps", but also a "violence corps".
In Mind Abuse: Media Violence and its Threat to Democracy, Rose A Dyson (2021) emphasized that when home and school become an unfriendly and unpleasant place, some children turn to "teachers" and "idols" of popular culture, which not only offer consumptive culture, but also cultural violence.
IDI SUBANDY IBRAHIM, Cultural, media and communication researcher; Postgraduate lecturer at Pasundan University
