On New Years Eve, Logan Paul, a Youtuber with a predominately young audience, posted a video of him at Aokigahara, a Japanese Suicide Forest.
It wasn’t the filming of his adventure in the forest that caused the controversy, but the filming of the body he stumbled upon.
Not only did he film the body numerous times, but he laughed and even went as far as to even use it as click bait.
Even if in the moment he felt as though it wasn’t concerning that he was showing a dead body to children, it is alarming to think of him editing the video and spending time on it without ever thinking about the consequences of his action.
When hearing about mass deaths, like with the Rohingyas in Myanmar, we can’t help but focus on the numbers rather than the individual person.
“We think it (violence) is awful but we don’t react to it like how we used to,” senior Jennifer Nguyen said. “We don’t see the magnitude of it. We don’t realize it’s not normal for this to repeatedly happen in a developing country.”
It isn’t until we see a single picture of a person that is being affected or hear a story about an individual that we start to actually begin to feel for them.
When Paul was seeing the body in the forest, he wasn’t thinking about the fact that it was an actual person, that the man was a son, a friend, someone that was admired and that he committed that act in a moment of pain, and moment of loneliness.
He was clouded by the need to shock the public which could be the root of the issue.
With the media always attempting to shock us, we often forget to look in depth at the person and the story.
Of course in the moment we feel sympathy for those who are on the receiving end of the travesty and we do feel a sense of fear and think about if for a little, we immediately forget and move on when hearing or remembering something else.
“I think that we are too desensitized to violence and other things in the media because there’s always new things that are showing up on Twitter and Facebook,” said senior Alichia House. “We’re so used to seeing similar things that we just become used to them.
As generations and technology continue to evolve and change, we are going to continue to be exposed to more violence .