@T_Clark notes that people have been saying for decades that TV and video games would lead to more violent behavior. As I mentioned, the OP doesn’t make that claim, and is actually saying something like the opposite—but it does encourage me to say something about what the effects might be.
Unlike the mechanics who built the gas vans of the Second World War—ordinary people, proud of their own small contributions and eager to get along with their colleagues—the people viewing death in their social media feeds are not part of a genocidal war machine. What I’m going for is the diagnosis of a condition, not predictions about consequences. My point, via Bauman, is that the civilizing process produces subjects who are not more likely to engage in violence, but who are structurally available for complicity in evil, by means of societal distancing mechanisms and processes.
But come to think of it that does look a lot like a dire warning, so let me try to put it differently. According to Levinas, being faced by the Other makes one responsible, and this responsibility constitutes subjectivity itself. To be a subject is, in part, to be capable of being addressed by and responsible to the Other.
If it’s true that this capacity is being numbed, the most disturbing thing—or maybe I should say the most interesting thing to me at the moment—is not that people will become more violent (as discussed, they probably won’t), or even that they will be more likely to take part in genocide, but that they have been in some sense hollowed out by participation in a society of pervasive distancing mechanisms.
To see what I mean, think of the difference between witnessing death or pain right in front of you and witnessing it on a screen. The former activates a moral response because of the presence of the suffering Other, whereas the latter increasingly doesn’t—and this is the specific sense of desensitization I meant: not that we become less sensitive to violence right in front of us, but that when repeatedly presented with real violence and suffering via a screen, whatever residual moral force the videos might carry is diminished.
Now extend this across the whole of society, in which an increasing proportion of morally significant reality—suffering, death, war, torture, and natural disasters—reaches us through screen-mediated channels.
So I’m trying not to issue dire warnings about all this, and I’m certainly not complaining about younger generations, but I do think it’s worth asking about the way people might be changing.