In this day and age, the world is at our fingertips. With a click of a button, people can find out the answer to any question that they could possibly think of. In this "Information Age" as some people have called it, we as a species have never been as globally connected as we are now. We are able to put human nature under a microscope and see it for what it truly is. For the most part, this is a good thing; it enables us to better understand other people's culture and customs as well as uniting us as humans living on the same planet. But, as we see humanity's true colors, we are able to see the good and the bad. This newfound technology enables to view the atrocities that humans actually commit. "Videotape" by Don DeLillo shows this and the lasting impact it is having on our society. As a result of the Information Age, we as people are becoming desensitized to the violence that they see and children are being exposed to the true nature of the world at a younger age.

Even though the "Videotape" was written in 1994, it is even more relevant now than it was then. As the story begins, the girl recording the video is the narrator's medium to seeing how the homicide happened, just as the internet is our medium in reality. Even though people know the horrific things that are going to happen, some people continue to watch these kinds of videos anyway. This can be contributed to people's curiosity, which is a trait that everybody posses. But as the video ends, something is lost between the viewer and what actually happens. As the narrator states, "The tape is surreal" (61), and what the tapes shows is probably something that most people have trouble understanding since its nothing like they have ever seen before. The narrator states that he has watched the tape countless times, so much so that "[he] know[s] from the hand wave exactly when he will be hit." (61) The fact that the narrator is able to watch another person die shows that with every hit of the replay button, the less and less he is affected by the videotape. The narrator starts to see it less and less as a homicide but as a typical video. 

 Not only has this desensitized us as a society, but it has also made children discover the world for what it truly is at a younger age than before. The story provides a great example for this by showing how the Video Kid witnesses the homicide through the camera lens. By looking through her camera lens, just as other kids look through their own types of "lenses" such as their computer and the internet, she loses her innocence earlier than before since she witnessed what her world can actually produce. And even after the man is shot, her curiousity does not disappear and she continues to film. At that point, something changes within the Video Kid, she goes through the transition that everyone must eventually go through. The transition that the once innocent must take in the world for what it truly is. Not knowing that what she was doing would have any impact whatsoever, "The girl got lost and wandered clear-eyed into horror." (61) As Don DeLillo puts it, "This is a children's story about straying too far from home." (61) There is no one in particular that you can blame for the girl witnessing those horrible things. Her need to explore the world around her was what got her into that situation. But in terms of the tool she used to investigate her surroundings, "it isn't the family car that serves as the instrument of the child's curiosity, her inclination to explore. It is the camera that puts her in the tale." (61) The ability to record the world around you and share it so that other people can see is why she was exposed to such horrors. Such is an analogy for what happens with all children. Their basic human need to discover and explore takes over and for the first time in history they are able to find out anything they could ever possibly want to know. As more and more of these videos are released though they  become less and less shocking. Just as how things become old the more you are exposed to it, these videos and images follow that same path.

For better or for worse, a society and its people will always change over time. Either by having to change their way of life to suit their new living conditions or adjusting to new technology, people adjust to the world around them. Just like we do now with the internet and our modern smartphones. We have already seen some changes because of these inventions and it will be interesting to see how we further continue to adjust to our ever changing environment.

