How Repetition Drains Meaning

        As seen in Don DeLillo’s "Videotape," the act of watching a raw moment on a loop can transforms a human tragedy into a cold emotionless moment, a phenomenon that has only worsted in our current time where our screens turn every reality into a meaning-stripped repetitive replay.

Delillo uses a Ekphrasis ( or in other words: the verbal representation of visual art or media), and one thing I feel like he really highlights using ekphrasis within this piece is the repetitive nature of media, especially in our more modern world where everything from long movies to TikTok‘s are spliced and repackaged as repetitive looping pieces of content, I’m not just talking about gifts, but a broader repetitiveness where by digitally slicing reality into predictable, three-second bites, we effectively strip the event of its trauma and its truth — like the news clip man getting shot in Delillo piece — turning a singular human moment into a 'hyperreal' texture that we consume. 

Neurologist & Psychologists Study this which they label as natural desensitization. According to Dr. Bruce D. Perry, a Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy, “The brain is designed to attend to novelty... once a stimulus becomes predictable, the brain shifts its focus, and the emotional impact of that stimulus rapidly diminishes.” 

what DeLillo describes corresponds to a measurable drop in N170 brain wave amplitude. which is a a specific electrical pulse in the brain that acts as a "first responder" to human faces and social cues. By the third or fourth loop of a video, the insular cortex (the part of the brain that translates what we see into an internal emotional) begins to "mute" itself. This is the bodies natrual survival mechanism: the brain cannot maintain a high-stress "fight or flight" response for a 10-second clip that repeats for five minutes, so it simply stops processing the victim as a human being.