Epistemic status: just brainstorming, no conclusions even

Here are some things I believe:

• violent video games don’t make kids violent
• porn is probably fine in moderation, not good in excess
• watching horror movies is in general fine
• the wave of torture porn movies (e.g. Saw¹, Hostel; sorry I’m reusing the word “porn” here but I’m referring to horror movies whose main draw is gruesome things happening to people, not porn) is a little troubling²
• Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and other big-budget TV shows might be peddling the same thing as Saw (essay that’s a bit extreme but in this direction)
• The News makes people think the world is worse than it is
• The News and Social Media cause rage and fear by rewarding it

Anyway, interesting ACX post about how, maybe when you’re sad, listening to sad music doesn’t actually help and you should just get yourself to listen to happy music. Experimental History continued speculation about set points. … Sounds like, if I may continue speculating, it’s not about the action you take, it’s about where your set point is. So like, if you want some adrenaline, you watch a scary movie, fine. You want more adrenaline, you watch a gruesome serial killer movie, you go “glad I’m not in their shoes”, your body regulates itself. The problem is if your set point for “amount of gruesome serial killers you want to watch” is too high?

But man, I don’t know; how does that explain Social Media and The News³? People have a need to get angry, The News offers them this? What happened before say 1900? Did people just get mad in public more?

Back to the core question: how much does media affect you? Maybe we can look at it in layers; imagine we’re all a cognitive, emotional, and archetypal layer (among others, I guess). Media can definitely throw your cognitive layer way off; read stories of crime every day and you think it’s everywhere. Media can sort of affect your emotional layer; certainly short term, at least. If you have to go console a friend at a funeral, maybe don’t watch Saving Private Ryan first (or Looney Tunes, for that matter). But it’s not likely to affect your long-term emotional set points. And media can’t really, hopefully, affect your really deep-seated stuff, your basic person-ness. (just walk away from the screen, like close your eyes)