A risk worth taking - Shock value vs Valueless shock.

You hear a scream, you turn, its nothing, you hear a scream, you turn, its nothing, you hear a scream... you dont turn.

Shock for its own sake loses efficacy quickly, it draws in a crowd but barely holds their attention, and oft times the attention it does hold is focused in the wrong place. What's the point of a signal fire if you aren't actually signally anything.

Don't get me wrong, there are times when the very shock itself is the signal, it is what is needed. The smoke from the burning bras, the exposed body you arent ever shown in the media, the urinal in the gallery. These shock us out of the patterns so called "normalcy" has trapped us in, and that is necessary.

But so often today the shock, the hook, the reveal, its all just in service of a metric in your monthly algorithms reports. It's just to generate enough views to get you that content creator pay-out, you don't care why people are looking at you or what they see when they do, you just care that they look.

And so the scream, the shock, it becomes meaningless, another thing to be packaged or package sales within. Within this we lose innovation, we stop pushing and asking hard questions because we are drowning under false thoughts and flags in a world that feeds of ephemeral outrage.

Through this deluge of shallow shock we tell ourselves that we aren't prudes, we aren't conservative or conformist, and anything that truly shocks us, that makes us uncomfortable must some how be a "step to far", after all look at all the "shocking" things we surround ourselves with. We have become not just numb to shock but averse to it.

You can kill billions of animals every year to enjoy their flesh, but heaven forbid anyone show you footage of a slaughter house. You can make art and marketing out of nude photography and implied sex, but just make sure to only include body types people find attractive. The military can advertise to you, but showing the other sides victims is taboo. Are you really immune to shock, or have you just surrounded yourself with pastiches of it.

We need less shocking thoughts and more thoughtful shocks.