Response to Kathleen’s “Personal Paranoia: Fuelled by Law & Order or the media?”
I found it interesting how you wrote about feeling scared in everyday life because these shows have had an effect on you. It’s funny because I find myself in the habit of trying to calm my mom down if I’m downtown too late or walking to the bus late at night. She watches tons of Law and Order and CSI and combined it equals way too much paranoia.
It’s crazy that a fictional TV show can have such an effect on people. My mom consistently tells me to “BE CAREFUL” as if I’m going into a war zone, even though I’m just walking around campus at night. It’s this thought process that I can almost see in her head flash by anytime I call her and say that I have to stay late to finish an assignment or study. What’s worse is her paranoia becomes contagious and soon I start to wonder “I could be that girl from LO:SVU on last week’s episode”. Crazy? Yes. However what pushes these shows so far into our brains that we believe it will turn into reality?
Well the fact that shows say that the episodes are “based on real events” doesn’t help. This plants ideas in viewer’s heads that these events occur on a regular basis. The amount of horrific and unimaginable violence on these shows makes it very surreal to think that these murders occur.
These shows are addicting, and by the end of a season a viewer feels connected to the investigators, scientists and agents that all formed teams to help solve crime. We all think we can solve real life murders and that we know exactly which chemical to use to find DNA in a forest. Now if we could just go on with our days without thinking an axe murderer is following us, we’ll all be just fine.
Xo,
Y
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