The Montreal Gazette has been busy reporting on all the dangers of the Interweb recently.* Take the 28 January edition, for instance: Roberto Rocha filled many pages of my Saturday read to report on "Gamer Widows" (women who have "lost" their husbands/boyfriends to the evil that is WoW or parents who witness their sons being sucked under the spell of MMORPGs) AND on what happens "When the Game Takes Over" (you lose your friends, your family, your education, your job, your relationship, your life...especially if you are a male between the ages of 14-40, if you are a student or professional in a high stress environment, if you have lousy social skills, if you have a depressive disorder, if you're easily bored, or are lonely, shy, depressed, anxious..., the list goes on).
I don't know about you, but I get a visual of Rachel Leigh Cook destroying a perfectly nice kitchen ("And this is what it does to your family!) in that "This is your brain on drugs" PSA from back in the day just thinking about it...
Of course this kind of panic around "new" technologies isn't new. It's so not new that it's getting a little bit more than tired. The targets (or "victims") may vary - from young girls who bait cyber stalkers to domestic realms abandoned by women who can't get enough 'anonymous' chat to geeky, pimply faced, anti-social teen boys who would rather sit in front of a machine than join the family for dinner to men who spend copious amounts of time and money drowning in a fantasy they can't play out in their everyday lives. But essentially it's all the same: an industry has emerged here that not only plays on the same age-old fears that have always lurked in dark corners (the white van circling the neighbourhood, for instance) but also plays on the same age-old hetero-gender tropes of normativity (mother's little helpers, the 'crisis' in masculinity and the demise of the breadwinner, for starters). Why couldn't I pick up the weekend paper and read, for instance, an exposé on the serious coin that's being made by the new branch of "expertise" economy (see here and here, for examples found by googling "internet addiction" in less than 10 seconds)? Or a feature story on how freakin' savvy girls are on the net? Or, or, or??
I know I've ranted on about the "culture of fear" that surrounds the vast, scary space that is the Internet in the past, but come on already—isn't it time we all moved past the easy polemics and got into discussions about something more interesting?!
*thanks to 340mps for parsing the news for grrrr inspiring pieces for me!
2 comments:
funny how mere tools can have attached to them such mythic qualities of both good and evil when they rub against the unknown...that creepy and alluring little black box known as technology.
I think you're probably bang-on: so much of this comes from fear of the unknown... baby-booming neo-luddites recoiling in the face of an IntarWeb they've reified into some kind of monstrous, gaping maw on the far side of known space or some shit.
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