Since that afternoon of September 11, 2001, when the war entered living rooms in real time, something has changed density. The images have occupied the space that previously belonged to waiting, simultaneity has consumed the distance. Violence has ceased to have a recognizable before and after: it circulates immediately, it imposes itself, it is replicated, it remains available.
Over time it took on the rhythm of the things we go through every day. Same continuity, same immediate access, same underlying presence. Only fiction has nothing to do with it here, even when the mind, in order to defend itself, tries to treat it like any other content.
An emotional familiarity that attenuates the internal response
At first the body responds in full. A scene stays with you, weighs on your stomach, drags you on for hours. Then another comes. And then another. At a certain point the mind recognizes a structure, almost a format. In June 2025, in Gaza, that structure was seen without much explanation. People queuing for food, long waits, bodies emptied by hunger, movements reduced to the essentials. Then you shoot him. Dead, injured, confusion. And in the following days the same design returns, with minimal variations and the same outcome.
Repetition shifts how an event is received. When a scene returns in the same form, the brain no longer encounters it as something entirely new. He anticipates it, he organizes it, he makes it manageable. Lower the intensity to keep holding. Here comes what psychology defines as psychic anesthesia. It is an adaptive response. When the amount of suffering exceeds the ability to process it, the emotional system reduces depth and grip.
Recent research helps to focus on this passage. The study on doomscrolling published on JMIR Mental Health shows that continuous exposure to negative content increases anxiety and modifies emotional regulation over time. Attention remains hooked, but it becomes thinner and loses depth. A work released on PNAS confirms that repeated exposure to traumatic images produces stress and progressive adaptations, including a form of detachment that makes the flow more bearable.
The brain continues to function. He simply takes cover, cuts intensity. Thus a scene that alone would have the strength to stop everything, within a sequence enters the general movement. Its gravity remains intact. What changes is the penetration. It remains before the eyes. Pass less inside.
An intermittent experience
The digital flow knows no real emotional hierarchies. A war scene appears between a light video and a sponsored one. The passage is dry. The brain suddenly changes register, without a threshold, without time to settle. From here a form of intermittent empathy arises. It lights up upon impact, then retreats, leaves room for something else, and reactivates when an image resurfaces. Short tremors remain, never long enough to really settle.
Meanwhile, even the victims change consistency in perception. The names fray, the numbers remain. The numbers become updates. The concrete experience loses weight, becomes remote, almost abstract. Repetition consolidates this structure. When the same type of scene returns, the brain recognizes it and incorporates it into the landscape. Familiarity takes the place of shock.
Against this background, a further, more technical, colder distance is added. Contemporary forms of war introduce continuous mediations: automated systems, remote operations, decisions filtered by data. Bodies slide towards another language. They become coordinates, objectives, paths.
Then come the algorithms. They select what remains visible, push what causes a rapid reaction, quickly replace what loses attention. In such an environment, suffering must compete for space with everything else. It is there that perception changes, slowly, without announcing itself. The scenes repeat, the numbers grow, the images flow. And meanwhile an opaque habit settles in: seeing everything, without being able to hear everything anymore.
You might also be interested in:
