> My question is this. At what point does desensitisation (reducing shock responses and promoting calm under extreme circumstances, good) become dehunamitisation (not a real word, bad)?

Are these measured on the same scale? Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Maybe that's worth debating, and maybe it isn't.

Frankly, this is one issue I think people think about too much, or at least moralize too much (which is not to say there aren't important moral issues at stake). Discerning humanity or dehumanization in something, or one's response to something, isn't something I think lends itself to being reduced to a set of objective rules. Better to go on a case-by-case basis.

In judging material, going by ratings schemes is insufficient. Ratings boards judge by quantity and extreme, but when issues of humanity come into play, purpose matters too. I'd call the gore and violence in Saving Private Ryan commendably honest, while the lesser gore and violence in Friday the 13th sensationalistic. I haven't seen any computer games with "commendably honest" violence, but even so, there's a difference between smashing aliens into gory bits in Duke Nukem and smashing innocent bystanders into gory bits in Carmageddon.

And one's *reaction* to all this is yet another issue. One can have an acceptable reaction to extreme gratuitous violence, and a depraved reaction to something lesser. One person playing a violent action game might be in it for the suspense role-playing of a spy hero battling against all odds, and the blood is an aspect of realism. Another might play it to fantasize about killing people gruesomely.

I would argue that the latter is immoral, while the former is not. Some would argue both are immoral, and others would argue that neither are immoral. But I bet all agree that the latter case is more extreme than the former, and yet neither person is bothered or disturbed by the blood itself. In general, I don't think how disturbed one gets at certain things has much bearing on issues such as this. Some people don't get disturbed enough; others are busy being disturbed at things that don't matter; still others are disturbed at all the WRONG things.

Then there is what BG points out. Real violence is a lot different from book/movie/game violence, even if it's realistic. Normal adults -- and, I would submit, even normal children above a pretty young age -- understand how to distinguish between real and fake violence. The understanding that a human being is actually being victimized by a depiction of violence has a pretty huge impact on how we react to it.

Speaking of kids. This is a total aside, but I get really annoyed by pseudo-intellects that think "clean" violence is somehow *more* harmful to children than unrestrained gore. The reasoning is that Star Wars-type violence teaches kids that violence is exciting and has no disturbing consequences, while Faces of Death teaches children that Violence Is Bad.

This might make sense if children were idiots. You can't be a kid and actually grow up without knowing what the consequences of violence are. You can be an adult and live a relatively violence-free life. I do. I'm a software engineer and work with other software engineers. The closest we get to violence involves Nerf Guns. But I wasn't even a violent kid, and I remember dealing with kids that wanted to beat me up, kids that wanted to beat up other kids, etc. Even if you don't get into fights, or have to avoid them, you know darn well what it's like to skin knees or bump heads or sprain ankles or bust elbows, and playful roughhousing gives you a pretty darned good sense of what it's like to get knocked over or body parts thwacked or ears flicked.

Protecting children from media violence (or sex) doesn't have anything to do with teaching them or not teaching them. The media shouldn't be responsible for teaching children anyway. That's for life and parents to do. No, it's about keeping things that evoke extreme visceral or psychological reactions from being exposed to developing minds not yet mature enough to understand and cope with them.

When I saw Star Wars in the theater as a kid, I knew darned well what it meant for an entire planet to blow up. I was floored. I couldn't even *imagine* how grave a calamity that was. I was not taught that killing was ok because I couldn't see the consequences of it. Nor did this scar me for life. It wasn't sensory overload. It wasn't confronting me with images I was not mature enough to understand. On the other hand, years *later*, I was at a friend's house and caught the end of a movie in which a badguy gets impaled on a crane hook and carried, screaming and convulsing, to a fiery death, and I really wish I had not seen that.

That's a side issue that has little to do with what you ask, but I had been meaning to talk about that in here soon anyway.