by April Phelps

Created on: April 19, 2008   Last Updated: April 21, 2008

When most people hear the word ripple, they think of a potato chip. Yet upsetting is when a greasy potato chip has more relevance and staying power in today's fast-paced culture, compared to tragedies reported in the news via the ripple-effect. The ripple-effect includes both the learning of information as it is happening, and the reporting style of it afterward by the media. While the first includes learning the information for sole purposes of learning it, the second suggests media framing techniques like frame amplification, salience, episodic and thematic framing desensitize people to forget the incident in a week. In other words although skipping a pebble appears serene, the environment becomes disturbed as the ripple gets bigger and bigger.

It is easy to feel less concerned or indifferent to the news if the person watching it isn't directly involved. In addition most of us think we are safe because the news is miles away. Therefore it can't happen to me right? This is a faulty assumption, for everyday we step out of our front door, we take a risk. Yet it is no reason to live in fear either.

However violence such as the Niu shootings propel the media to inadvertently use those already traumatized by the incident to get information out to the world. Surviving the aftermath of violence is hard enough without the media and the like trying to grasp a person in shock who just witnessed or survived the incident. I know when I walked out of the Holmes Student Center this previous Valentine's Day; I wanted to express a few choice words to the five news choppers hovering over my campus. The news can be impersonal when a person is in the middle of it.

Even more alarming is the scene of family members learning about the violent incident for the first time on the nightly 5:00 news. Panic sets in for not knowing if loved ones miles away are okay. This is enough to send any parent into a tailspin of fear and worry. Secondly family members watching their televisions cannot protect their child from harm. As a result some people will call the news stations for more information or go to the scene without finding out whether it is safe to do so. Case in point more people arrive on the scene to scan the crowd for their loved ones and worry more when they aren't immediately accounted for after the incident.

Sensitive even more so are the human beings in the incident as it happening, for the ripple-effect of subjective reality to objective awareness requires an adjustment of sorts

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