Jesse A. Schroeder

Tweet
Oddly enough, as I was listening to a podcast of Fresh Air yesterday in which the discussion was robots in war. Briefly, the writer being interviewed mentioned "war porn," and the idea he was talking about is very similar to my previous post on "poverty porn" - both of which I don't think are actual terms (at least they aren't on wikipedia yet). Here are some of the statements P. W. Singer made during the interview in regards to robots, the Iraq war, and "war porn":

"I call it "YouTube War" because it is the first war you can watch but you don't have to be there. The robots see all, so we are taking clips, watching from afar. There are some 7,000 clips of the Iraq war, and soldiers call it "war porn." They aren't only being watching, but emailed and passed around. The worry is that it connects people to war but it actually widens the gap, it creates a further distance, they watch war but they experience less."

The last statement is what really strikes me - that we are more and more "connected" but we are experiencing less and less. The causes could be traced to any number of trends in the "digital age" - television as a dominant medium of communication; internet and YouTube; and even more basically the impact consumerism has to fundamentally separate the consumer from the product. We enjoy the benefits, without experiencing or realizing the cost in any real way. The efforts and the energies necessary to produce the products we consume are completely covered when all we see is a small price tag - and in the same way, the real human sacrifice, the suffering, the emotions and the feelings are wiped away when we experience war through the a robotic lens.

So as I was waiting for Kellye to get out of her graduate class, I walked into the bathroom of the library, thinking about this whole "porn/detachment" idea. First, I wondered if the connection to the word "porn" was really appropriate - the word comes from "porne" (prostitute) and "graphe" (to write), and basically means printed forms of sexual pleasure. However, the final line in my little widget dictionary seemed to fit:

intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings

And that's what happens when we begin to view human life as entertainment - we are detached, and we lose the aesthetic and the emotions. We want to be stimulated. We want to be entertained - no matter what the cost.

- Stay tuned for a post on "mission porn" -