The internet: numbing the pain?

I have been trying to avoid reading the numerous press stories which every day update us with yet more sordid details of the murder of Meredith Kercher, however, the fact of the murder raises some interesting questions regarding mass media and lines of social acceptability.

It seems to me that we live in an age where no matter what your appetites, and how disturbing or damaging they may be to others, if you look hard enough, you will be able to find someone of a like mind. In fact, with the growing sophistication of internet search engines and the broadband technology to share information and images quickly and cheaply, we are in serious danger of losing all sense of moral perspective. It seems it is now possible for anyone, no matter how depraved, to find a willing accomplice somewhere in the world: and so deviance is normalised.

We throw our arms up in the air at the child soldiers in the Sudan and Uganda, who have been so brutalised that they have lost all sense of their humanity, and yet, we seem not to see that by a less violent, less obvious, but more pervasive means, we are all heading for the same fate.

Footage of happy slapping, ever more shocking pornography, and unlimited and uncensored images of violence, which are now so easily accessible to all, desensitise us all to the suffering and degradation they represent. Indeed, it has become almost impossible to avoid this material when using the internet, with hidden links and typo squatters cunningly designed to intercept even the most innocent user.

Whenever I hear of a shocking crime committed against an individual I wonder whether without this ever present bombardment and our seemingly insatiable appetites for new and more shocking filth, the perpetrators of these acts would have had the imagination or the flagrant disregard of the rest of our species to dream up and then enact them.