The Value Of Shocking

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The author of documentary movie 13th Van Jones once said that: “You need to shock people into paying attention.” I agree with this statement. Because I think shock value does work, and sometimes can draw a lot of public attention notably in a time when new media is more developed than ever. However, everyone has a threshold towards the description of ‘shocking’, and I believe that there is a fine line between shocking people, and over the line to turn people away.

The definition of ‘shock’ indicates that it is “a sudden or violent disturbance of the mind, emotions, or sensibilities.” But everyone has his own interpretation towards the definition and has a different level of shocking acceptability, so some actions that are regarded as ‘shocking’ …show more content…
Sometimes when we are reading a book, it is hard for us to concentrate from beginning to the end. But once there is a shocking plot pops up, audiences’ attention will be put into the novel immediately, curiosity is excited and furthermore, thinking is aroused. In the book《The narrative of Frederick Douglass》, Douglass describes the harsh living condition of slaves with plenty of shocking and brutal scenarios. A wife of the slave owner can ‘seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl’s nose and breastbone, and thus ended a (sixteen-year-old) girl’s life’ (15), just because she was too tired to hear the baby’s cry and didn’t stop the baby from waking up the wife. Also, to slaves that work for farm owner Colonel Lloyd, ‘They never knew when they were safe from punishment’, because whether they will be whipped severely totally depends on ‘Colonel Lloyd’s own mind’ and ‘the look of his horses’(10). In Douglass’s interpretation, we know that ‘the slaves became as fearful of tar as of the lash’ (10) because tar means that they have suspicion of stealing owner’s fruit, and the owner can kill a slave with ‘his mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood’ (14). These descriptions are so gory and brutal. The language turns the abstract concept of slavery into a more visualized scene, and thus it becomes more shocking to me. Before reading this book, I never knew the slavery history can be this cruel, but when I finally realize that when reading these chapters, my attention was all drew into it, I was kept shocked and cannot move my eyes off
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