The short story the "Videotape", brings up many interesting points about how violence is perceived in our society, as well the role that technology factors into that. In this era, we have never been as globally connected as we are now. We are able to see and hear things they would've been unimaginable just mere decades ago. We're able to put humanity under a microscope and see it for what it truly is. For the most part, this is a good thing; it enables us to have a better understand of other people's culture and customs as well as uniting us as one people sharing 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 more and more desensitized to the violence around us because of the violent and brutal media that we readily consume.

Even though the "Videotape" was written in 1994, it is even more relevant now than it ever was before. For the narrator in the story, his means of witnessing the murder is through a 12-year-old girl who happened to catch it on tape, the way for the man to watch the tape was to sit in front of the TV as the news station played the tape over and over again. With each passing rewind, the tape becomes easier to watch, as does anything if you are exposed to it for a long enough period of time. What is frightening for the man and the rest of the people who watched this video is the unknown aspect of it. The first time you watch the tape, or one similar to this, the thing that people are most anxious about is not if something bad is going to happen but when. As the narrator puts it, "Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is the reason alone to stay fixed on the screen. (P.63)" But with each passing view, the video becomes less and less unexpected. The narrator had watched it enough times to get to the point that "[he] know[s] from the hand wave exactly when he will be hit. (P.61)" If the reason for watching the tape is to be thrilled by the random, unexpected elements in life what is the point of watching it until it becomes predictable? It's because we can't look away, even if we wanted to.

The inability for us to look away and steer clear from this kind of media can be attributed to our natural born curiosity and our love for entertainment. The videotape, that the narrator and many others like him couldn't stop watching, "[was] a crime designed for random taping and immediate playing  playing it immediately after the taping became part of the culture.(P.62)" By random taping and immediate playing, the narrator is referring short clips of things like shootings, car crashes, store robberies, etc. These were so popular when they first came out because people wanted to see the unexpected, they want to be on the edge of their seating having to hold their breath in anticipation of what is going to happen in the clip. These clips, where the duration was short and the shock value was high, started to become popular and even more so with the introduction of social media. Where with the click of a button, you would people able to share a video instantly with thousands of people.

One of the main negatives caused by watching these kinds of videos is that we dehumanize the people in it I an attempt for us to distance ourselves from them. Most people would be able to watch a video of someone being shot and kill but, I don't know many people who would be able to handle seeing that in real life. The more times you replay a video, the more expected and planned it all seems. We don't see the main person who ends up dying is a regular guy; we see him as just an individual who ends up dying. We try to detach ourselves from the deceased in the video by dehumanizing him, making it seem as though we are different then him, not just in appearance, but on the inside as well. We can't fathom a freak accident like that occurring to someone we know or love. We act as though there's not even a remote possibility that something that unexpected could happen to you. Instead of our reaction to the video being "Wow I feel so sorry for him and his family I hope they are able to recover" we think, "Wow did you see that?" It's always important to remember "that every breath you take has two possible endings. (P.63)"

As time goes on, people and their respective societies and cultures alter. Our increasingly desensitization could easily be a side effect of us adjusting to the new technology we have and our way of life that is constantly changing. I believe that one day, all of the "tapes" that are out there will become expected, which will in turn make them lose their appeal. 

