The Internet
Coby
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8210Members
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8210Members
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">And our morals</div> First time ever I try to pop my head out to the discussion forum <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
I just wanted to see what you people think about the fact which I think is pretty bad: With the Internet around today, you can see whatever you want to, and even what you may not. The latest video clips show beheading, torture, threatening and just pure nasty stuff that some of you wish you'd never seen. With most people though, after seeing these things they shrug and move on. <b>Shrug and move on!</b>
Is it the violence in games, in the Internet, the movies, the news that's made us like this, or is it the fact that we just don't care about it?
I can watch most of these stuff and I just don't go ":0" about it. Except if it's headed towards female person(s). For me, I feel like it's all about something that doesn't touch me. "It's not my neighbour being killed, it's some guy I don't know. It's not on this planet, it's not real!" But Last night I really started to think of it and got really scared how I realised that it has really happened. But even then I just can't get any mad about a video of a man dieing, but oh lord if I see animals violated ... that just drives me off my mind and I get really bad feelings.
Discuss abour your thoughts, feelings, and opinions how you react to the possible violence you have or have not seen! Do you feel for the bad guy getting killed on a movie? What if you'd replace that victim with a female?
I just wanted to see what you people think about the fact which I think is pretty bad: With the Internet around today, you can see whatever you want to, and even what you may not. The latest video clips show beheading, torture, threatening and just pure nasty stuff that some of you wish you'd never seen. With most people though, after seeing these things they shrug and move on. <b>Shrug and move on!</b>
Is it the violence in games, in the Internet, the movies, the news that's made us like this, or is it the fact that we just don't care about it?
I can watch most of these stuff and I just don't go ":0" about it. Except if it's headed towards female person(s). For me, I feel like it's all about something that doesn't touch me. "It's not my neighbour being killed, it's some guy I don't know. It's not on this planet, it's not real!" But Last night I really started to think of it and got really scared how I realised that it has really happened. But even then I just can't get any mad about a video of a man dieing, but oh lord if I see animals violated ... that just drives me off my mind and I get really bad feelings.
Discuss abour your thoughts, feelings, and opinions how you react to the possible violence you have or have not seen! Do you feel for the bad guy getting killed on a movie? What if you'd replace that victim with a female?
Comments
i guess we should feel bad about all the movies of car crashes, fire-based-accidents and painful events. i guess it's because we have been telling ourselves "everything you see on this screen is fake, and not to be taken seriously"
"I want to chop his f#ing head off RIGHT NOW"
We say we don't mean it, but we know that we did mean it, which is why when we see it done, we're disturbed.
Anything that is human can be found on the internet. If you call the voyeuristic showing of what is happening in a human mind in real life "morally degrading," it leads me to wonder how fake morality really is.
That's what I thought: When we watch the news we see disasters and fire and death. When we watch the news, it's like "real-life-entertainment" whereas the hollywood equivalent is what we're used to: people die and then walk to the backstage. So<b> is hollywood the cause</b>? We're used to people getting up, cleaning off the fake blood and getting their hairdo right after a scene of a deadly accident?
Most of us see these daily, but what if right now you'd see your neighbour getting shot. How would you react? The same as what you've done after watching those videoclips: Shrug and have some more popcorn?
The peasants in Medieval times got desensitized to pain because physical suffering and oppression were an integral part of being a Medieval peasant. We don't have that situation in modern times, however we do see more pain and suffering than we experience, unlike the times of old. The internet is part of that.
Example.
A knife can be used for many things. It can cut rope, cut up meat, it can be used to carve or it can be used to operate on someone in an emergency.
Or, the knife can be used to stab someone in the face, cut off limbs or as has been graphically depicted, to behead persons.
The same goes for guns. The objects are not in question, it is how people use the objects that comes under question and the very same goes for drugs. Some drugs are worse then others, Heroin for example leads to addiction and often death. It entails a rise in crime to support the habit and destroys lives, and hence is illegal for good reasons. The internet is sort of like the ultimate database for information. The problem lies in actually getting that information from that massive database. Google certainly helps with that <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->. You can find anything and everything you ever wanted to know (or not know).
No one is forcing you to watch the videos of Nick Berg being decaptitated. That was YOUR choice. It is YOUR morals that you should be questioning if anything, and the morals of the persons distributing those videos.
A tool is only as good or bad as the person that wields it, no tool is inherently evil, and no tool is inherently good. They are just tools, inanimate objects. It is the one with the brains to use them that incurs all responsibility for their use, and the morals by which they use them.
Plenty of people are as callous with or without the internet, without television, without gladitorial games, without public beheadings. Just like people are just as violent, just as fun and just as anything.
We've living in one of the nicest times of human existence. If you have a computer, I can pretty much gurantee you have it better than any peasant/serf or even some knights and higher nobility a few hundred years ago. Then they also had more violent lives; with real bandits in the woods, public executions or jousting tournaments.
Someone might draw a similarity between a jousting tournament, and say a movie with a jousting tournament. The difference being no one gets hurt intentionally with ours (while in medieval times, if you were against a knight you didn't like you could aim for his head during the joust to intentionally try to kill him). If you had money and power, you could do whatever you wanted.
Well, the world is much the same (in a gentler way); now we have two lines like this:
1. You're a celebrity, a sportstar or a politican and you can leniency with your crimes (not as much the politicains, but they get popularity and power if their reputation comes out on top).
This completely ruins the ideal of equality. If cases like the Winona Ryder's shoplifting garner more air time than a 3 year old's kidnapping, you can tell something is screwed in our morality system right now. Or when a sports star like Mark Chumura gets more notoriety from allegedly being in a hot tub with a minor instead of 5 murders that happened in Chicago.
I don't care about those celebrities, why are their lives more important than anyone elses? [of course, it all roles back to greed in the end: you show celebrities, low minded people enjoy watching people they know, you get money].
2. You're a terrorist, warlord or tyrant. This is more like a lord in older times, when they had control of what their people did. Except now they have to watch out for higher powers, and people that care about the people they kill. Their overall strength is still determined by money and power and how they influence people with it.
So you come to the internet's impact on morality. Morality is defined by the person wielding it, mine is different than yours, yours is different than mine. I'm callous and stoic by nature around violence. Conversely get disgusted when someone makes a fool of themselves, or is mistreated (I see it coming in sitcoms, don't want to watch it, so I change the channel - you know it's there).
I hate to say it, based on public opinion and peer pressure, but people are fickle. How many Americans did you see with flags out on their lawns before September 11th, 2001? And how many did you see afterwards?
What's the chance of a similar event happening again relatively soon? Almost nothing. How has it changed? People think we're going to be attacked tomorrow; there's a department of Homeland Security; troops are stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan (woot for the 'Cold War effect').
Want a better example?
Before September 11th, the Red Cross was pleading for people to donate blood.
A few weeks after September 11th the Red Cross had so much blood that a lot of it went to waste.
The Red Cross is short on blood once again (not just from the war).
[coincidently, the Red Cross kept asking for blood, even when they announced they had to throw out that which had gone bad]
I feel for the people that died. I wish I could feel for everyone that's ever died nobly enough based on my moral standards (despite how unrealistic that goal is - right up there with my goal to learn everything possible that I can in my lifetime [sans the calculus <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->]). It's just not very strong. I see a point in every death, as it brings about the future. It's a part of history. Every event has great importance. I'm not going to cry for them though; I'll cry for people I knew, like my dad or my dog, Murphy.
Based on other peoples' standards, my moral stance on 9/11 (I wonder if anyone else recognizes the minor irony in that date) and the POW decapitations in Iraq might infuriate people. I'm completely void of direct opinion. People died, what do you want me to physically do about it? I actually find taking pleasure in death unacceptable (feigned or otherwise [not really talking about movies, I mean if a terrorist wants to be like, "I killed him because it would be fun." When all he wants to do is make people mad.]), and it makes me mad that people would defoul their own religion to try and enrage their enemy, but what am I going to do about how they died?
So when everyone was going, "Oh my God, I can't believe this happened," or "I wonder who did it," or the people crying (out of fear or sorrow I'm not sure), I stood by with detached interest wondering, "Why attack the WTC? Why isn't the WTC's steel treated to withstand extreme heat that burning jet fuel would create?"
I've heard people talk about how they've gone to www.rotten.com (which I really don't suggest if you're weak on the stomach or under 14 or so) and laughed at the misfortunes of others; goiters the size of footballs, decapitations and the like. I look at it occasionally out of sheer morbid curiousity - nothing more, nothing less. There's also the people that are truely disgusted at it (along with those disgusted by it because it's the 'right' feeling to have).
So, in the deepest respect to this thread's original query, paraphrased, "Does the internet contribute to a decline in moral character; such as when people watch the decapitation of American POWs from Iraq?"
I have to say no, it doesn't. People's moral character is based on how they were raised. How they think. Now what they see (although, it contributes to how they were raised, so eventually they'll get more used to seeing the violence and their body will begin to counteract the effects of disgust). So I ask people reading this thread (probably more directed at Americans, but...), How did you react to September 11th, 2001? Did you give blood? Do you still give blood?
Of course, you still can't blame the internet, if you do find fault in my reasonings provided here (and man is it a long read...); for as Ralph Waldo Emerson says (paraphrased, of course), "It is the distinct attribute of man to be able to change one's mind on anything."
Woot, sorry for wasting so much of your time <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> .
Most kids see their first murder on television at the age of what, 6, 7? I dunno, but at a very young age. Then they turn 11-12 ish, and start actively watching tv and movies, in which lots of people happen to die. Then they get into the ages of 14-18 and then above, start to use the internet, and they've seen pretty much everything, anything, a lot of times. It just doesnt "shock" people if they see something they've seen a 200 times before.
Take the Iraque war for example, with all the incidents involving piled-up dead bodies. "SHOCK HORROR! THIS IS INHUMAN!11" was the general response. Then, after a week or two, when people zapped along CNN and saw yet another pile of bodies, in the re-run of the news of last week, they were "Meh, whats on that channel then?"
A sanction is a reaction from a member or members of society that is designed to ensure a person complies with the social norm. The Internet removes any form of effective sanctioning, creating an environment in which deviant behavior runs unchecked. Any sanction is usually limited to a short, written quip. This quip, which can come in the form of a message board post or IM sentance, comes not from a person, but from a faceless entity who won't interact with the deviant in a face-to-face situation. When you combine that with the fact that deviant sub-cultures can set up communities where people who would sanction them are banned and removed from the culture, you get a potent combination of a society of like-minded individuals without rules. I'll give examples.
1. The Wolfsoul community disallows "outsiders" to ridicule members. Anybody who attempts to sanction members or attempts to enforce compliance with social norms is ignored and summarily banned. The result is a community that operates without the influence of mainstream society, allowing the members to effectively do whatever they want without having to think about what the rest of the world thinks.
2. When I was in high school, I witnessed a girl dumping a guy. The guy, upon receiving the news, proceeded to sit down in the hallway and cry. His behavior was well outside the social norms, like the ideas of the Wolfsoul community, but his behavior was exposed to society as a whole. As a result, people snickered and laughed at him, other men shunned him and made a blatant effort to avoid him. The reactions weren't conciously chosen in order to hurt him, but rather to make the point that what he was doing wasn't normal and he needed to stop crying, pull himself together and get to his next class.
While the internet isn't entirely void of sanctioning, it is far more rare. This discussion board is a good example of where sanctioning occurs on-line. Nem and Monse moderate the board in accordance with the board rules and those rules are drawn from social norms. However, message boards where the norm is a veritable free-for-all are far more common and you do get communities where social deviance is actually enforced.
you're talking about a 747 filled with jp-8, that stuff lights and you will not be walking home tonight.
by the time you've seen your hundreth shooting, dead body, pile of such bodies, car crash etc. the shock from seeing something like it tends to go away. most kids saw piles of corpses when studying WWII, and after a few pictures the shock value of the pictues went away. why should we expect them (or us) to be shoked by startlingly simmilar piles of bodies now?