Are we psychologically capable of surviving Internet?
I saw this picture today on my Yahoo! page (yep those are her toes broken in her infancy and folded and bound under her feet).
After the initial grossed-out shock, I was struck by the fact that the Internet brings every weird, gross, disgusting and horrifying thing that happens in the world front and center into my normal daily experience. Now this particular image is not that bad . . . relatively speaking. Unless you have a foot fetish in which case you're likely already on the floor quivering in horror . . . or delight—who can tell what you freaks are thinking.
After seeing this, I started to wonder whether we were psychologically capable of handling the ceaseless flow of disconcerting imagery the Internet facilitates. I've seen some amazingly horrible things on the Internet: beheadings in the Arab world, people's bodies being maimed, the close-up bodily remains of gruesome murder victims, diseased body parts, the ugliest dog in the world and of course the countless vile skanks that seem to find their way into the news or the Google search pages.
The first response I had was "well, hey, that's real life, mate!" But I wonder whether this is an appropriate response. For example, most people who have to witness a beheading first-hand likely have beheadings as a part of their discourse. So I propose that there's an element of cultural conditioning there. People who see gruesome murders first-hand are in general either people who do them or people who investigate them (not saying cops are conditioned, but they're "prepared" even if the preparation is poor and they are counseled to assist their getting over it).
But further to that, someone who sees a beheading in Iran may not also be exposed to the myriad other forms of horror the Internet avails. That is, just because it's real life, does not mean that we're capable of dealing with every horror known to humanity. Yet on the perch from which I view the Internet I can flick from a beheading to an exploded cat to the world's fattest woman in the time it takes to click a button. Are we capable of dealing with the entire world. After we've been sullied by this experience we may find ourselves in the dilemma of Nietzsche's madman asking "who will wash away the world?"
6 comments:
This hits on something that has become a v. big deal for me lately: the objectivization of human experience. People like Theodor Adorno talked about this in the '50s and '60s, but then the discussion was mostly relegated to 'high culture' -- putting it in opposition to 'pop culture' -- and focused esp. on things like art & music. Since the 1980s in particular, though, everything has become objectivized. Human experience has become that of postmodern irony, if you like. We watch tv, for instance, and reward ourselves for realizing we're watching tv and thus don't have to take it seriously. See, for example, the prevalence of those ads that mock the fact that they're ads. I think something of the same could be said for much of our participation in the happenings of life itself. Wars, political movements, or the possibility of ecological horror become merely things of interest (viz., 'It'll be really to see if _________), or something to see (as though on the internet) & not actually deal with or truly process.
A couple of years ago I wrote a (pretty incoherent) post about what I was just rambling about.
Brad, what you say about TV is really interesting. It reminds me of the burgeoning hyper-self-reflexivity in literary and critical studies. Since we now "know" we're reading, we can rest back and enjoy the legitimation of whatever our reading experience produces without further self-reflexivity/investigation.
Thus I think of your connecting this to wars, etc. The sense we have of the war or politics is really constructed via media (a well worn point), so one wonders if we confuse an ethical response to the war or politics in general with the sort of "reward" you mention.
What I wonder is why do you make the choice to watch these things in the first place. I have seen many of what you have talked about first or second hand and I have to walk around with these things scarred into my mind the rest of my life. I am back into a "war mindset" right now and I know that these things do not bother me, but when I return home from this tour, I know I will have to deal with the nightmares again, the skiddishness, and many of the other effects. Not to mention what my wife has to go through in helping me reconstruct my mindset to being in a "safe" place, where people do not wish to kill me.
Why someone in their right mind would want to expose themselves to this blows my mind. As noted all you see a certain point of view that someone wishes you to see. Trust me, war is hell, but we chose to fight this so you don't have to, why put yourself through this?
Well, it's not so much of a conscious choice at first. The advent of the Internet is not really over and we're all still learning how to deal with it.
To be honest, when I was first able to get images on my computer from the Internet (back in the early 90s), I was so blown away by it that it never occurred to me that it would be a problem. But it's just now that there is developing a genuine attempt within our society to re-think the ethics and social implications of having an Internet.
At the same time, the Internet reveals a world to us from which we have been sheltered while living in the wealthy west. So I do think that some images are important to view for that reason. My question is whether we can deal with ALL of the images. I don't think we can.
I agree with that, the problem I see is the fact that American's lack the self control needed to be able to hold themselves back from the huge influx of both pictures and ideas. Perhaps I have little faith in my country, or little faith in humanity, but they have given me little to have faith in. There are cultures that would be able to stand up to such a wave of images, but those are the cultures that see many of them on a daily basis. America (or the west in general) is very sheltered and seeing all of these images at least will create psycological problems with many of the people seeing them in one way or another without there being a safe way of the person being able to decompress what is being seen. Not to the extent of many of our soldiers coming home with ptsd, but minor effects will linger in some.
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