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Contemporary Alienation
In the past week, the local papers ran a disturbing story about a young man who broadcast his own suicide on the Internet via a webcam. Reports indicated how those watching it responded in various ways ranging from a kind of cold macabre interest to downright sadistic glee.
Some may have considered the whole affair a hoax while still others became enthralled in the absolute strangeness of it all. Whatever the interest may have been, it’s fair to say that we have officially entered a whole new realm of cyber-sickness that has the potential to affect all of us — the 21st century’s version of encouraging a jumper to leap from a ledge.
Indeed, the extent to which technology has now invaded everyone’s privacy and the depth to which personal lives are exposed to the anonymous public has set the stage for re-defining and re-understanding how extensive the potential is for creating an increasingly de-humanized society. This is not a new theme but technology has now raised it to new and unprecedented levels.
Rather than bemoaning the dangers of technology, let’s first agree that technology is, in itself, neither morally good nor morally evil; it is simply what it is. Technology is basically another means to accomplish certain tasks. It’s the current version of the wheel, the inclined plane, the cotton gin, the gas engine, the telephone or any other device that has helped human beings to achieve their goals more efficiently and, hopefully, to communicate more effectively.
But with everything else, technology is subject to human behavior, human intentions, and the inevitable influence of human beings who seem to find new and creative ways to screw things up. The human genius to invent technologies is always in competition with an equal genius to mis-apply new and wonderful entities for malicious, selfish and, yes, sinful uses.
Whatever does not contribute to the human condition, whatever defaces the inherent goodness of humankind, and whatever rejoices in the suffering of another, whether it be a lonely tormented young man on one side of a webcam or a nation in turmoil, hungry and at war on the other side of the planet, whatever or whoever considers such misfortunes as fodder for their own entertainment, are guilty of a grievous sin that speaks loudly and voluminously about the way we are creating a faceless and dehumanized world.
The tragedy, for all of us, is that a suffering young person, for whatever reason, had the need to display his personal agony for an anonymous audience. That young man was indeed a person. He had a name and, we can safely presume, some network of significant others who knew him and probably had some affection for him. To most of us, however, who read the media accounts, he has now become a statistic and herein we find the sin of it all.
We forget the personhood of this now dead stranger. We read the story with any number of different emotions and the subject of it all becomes a cold and distant statistic. Except for those who knew and loved him, he becomes forgotten, he becomes a ‘thing’ and simply another news story that most can afford to forget.
The tragedy is double-edged. The loss of a human life, a life created and loved by God and then, on top of it all, the impersonal “watching” of it as it unfolds for an expansive and detached public to see.
Technology isn’t the culprit. It’s too easy to blame the Internet which, in itself, is nothing but a tool. Like any other tool, it can be used to repair or it can be used to destroy. The hammer can secure two surfaces together or it can tear those surfaces apart.
While the Internet has the wonderful potential for enhancing communication and linking people in creative and positive ways, it obviously has an equal potential for dissociating people, alienating them and, even worse, passing off calumny, slander and the personal misfortunes of real people as entertainment.
The increased alienation and the de-sensitizing among persons is given a broader audience by the power of the Internet to reach more of us, but the responsibility lies with us to tame the destructive applications of a very potent instrument; to remain vigilant, to keep in mind that we are persons with a unique dignity derived from our Creator who saw fit to bring us, each one of us individually and personally, into the world.
As Christians, we are a people who celebrate personhood. We need to remind ourselves not to interpret our own lives or the lives of others as mere ‘objects of interest’ or sources of perverse entertainment. The tormented guy on the other side of the webcam is indeed my brother.
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