Technological Anesthesia

The topic for this article came to me in a flash as I was innocuously talking about movies with a colleague of mine. We were talking about Remembrance Day and she was telling me how she couldn’t watch “Saving Private Ryan” as it was just too much for her; it was just much too intense. My response to her was that she’s very correct, that it’s an extraordinarily powerful movie and it wasn’t easy to watch. Further, I went on to say that I had a feeling that what Saving Private Ryan portrayed was probably very close to reality. My thoughts were that I didn’t mind the fact that movie was so graphic because the intent was to show how horrible war was – that the reality wasn’t John Wayne shooting some guy with a ten gallon hat who dropped down in a very tidy and dainty death.

Now, this started me thinking…

As a teen, I was a big fan of Star Trek. This conversation reminded me of one of my absolute favourite episodes. In this particular episode, the gang from the U.S.S. Enterprise was called upon to try to resolve a war between two feuding planets that had been going on for centuries. As Captain Kirk began to understand the situation, he came to the realization that these two societies had come up with a creative and “civilized” manner of warfare.

Instead of resolving their disputes with conventional warfare, each side had a computer which randomly selected citizens from the other planet. These chosen few dutifully marched towards the chambers where they were zapped into non-existence. The uppity-ups of society applauded this approach saying how humane, cost-efficient it was, not to mention the total lack of collateral damage. Kirk’s inevitable end of episode soliloquy stated that THIS was the whole problem – that they weren’t experiencing the travesty and the destruction of war so they didn’t have the incentive to resolve the conflict.

I relate this episode to something that I call technological anesthesia. Simply put, excessive use of technology in our day to day lives can numb our senses and distort reality.

There was a recent study where doctors noticed a phenomena where young male adults who normally are…how shall I delicately say – enamored with the thought of the physical attributes of the opposite sex are actually being diagnosed with withering sex drives. Their findings are that in many of these cases, these are men who spend just a bit too much time viewing the plethora of pornography online, and as a result, they’re quite desensitized.

There’s another aspect of technological anesthesia which becomes increasingly prevalent, and this is what are referred to as “trolls”. A troll is a term for someone who logs into a message board and posts something inflammatory or offensive, just to cause a ruckus. Many times when on message boards, there are “flame wars” or insults lobbed back and forth between combatants. The problem is that when we interact online, we often forget that there are actually people on the other end – all that we see are the digital personas and such, who cares if they’re offended or hurt by our words? It goes without saying that if you took all of the citizens of one specific inflammatory message board and put them all in a room and forced them to talk and engage with each other, I think that it’s safe to assume that the bravado which is displayed online would not be nearly as common, lest someone get a poke in the nose otherwise.

In my mind, this in a nutshell is one of the biggest problems with online communication, interaction and social networking. We have lost that humanity and are only seeing the bits and bytes of letters flowing across the screen without giving due consideration that the other person is someone’s daughter, someone’s father or someone’s aunt.