What Does It Say About Us?
The media is awash this weekend with images of a group of grown men lounging and preening at the New York 9/11 Memorial taking “selfies” with a female “sex doll” in tow.
Reports suggest that it was Brits on a “stag-do”, a.k.a. bachelor party outing, as if that explained it all perfectly.
It’s fascinating how much unsavory conduct occurs by those who profess undying loyalty and love for their betrothed.
Their conduct is perfectly explainable under the rubric of complete self-absorption.
We used to gaze at our navel’s at home, now, all the world’s a highly reflective mirror, even the so-called sacred space.
Public self absorption which descends into behavior correctly termed horrific is a way station on the way to human incivility.
And the final stop is a society devoid of compassionate and thoughtful interaction.
So-called “social media” and “smartphones” have created a “parallel now” where people can be present in a certain physical space yet, in the ways that matter most, cognitively and emotionally, they are world’s away.
They are fully engaged in their cyber-verse, constructing a contrived reality from snippets of the space they move through.
In such a setting, social norms, etiquette and conduct impede the creation of the perfect, though imagined, world they seek and so these “rules” are dismissed or ignored.
Why are people so attracted to this electronic “parallel now”?
Is it an escape from the boredom of life?
Is technology that exciting?
Does it offer us a way to construct a fantasy life in place of the harsh reality of our real one?
I used to scoff at the “robots will take over the world” notion.
Not any more.
We are already well down that road as the first step is to cleverly interrupt the human connection and begin to replace it with an alternate reality which provides emotional comfort and support.
The social media/smartphone “parallel now” has successfully created that effect though in their current form our “robots” fit in our pocket or purse and are mostly out and held near eye level.
With some irony we should note that our bachelor lads, smartphone/robots in hand, toted along the other half of the completed robotic/human form, in their case a sex doll.
Soon enough, toting will be a thing of the past and the two will be melded into one.
And the notion of a place like the 9/11 Memorial, where humans communally recall tragedy and heroism, will fade away as an obscure and obsolete anachronism of a bygone era.