Have you ever stopped to consider, where will technology really ever stop?
I was just reading about a terrible crime which sounds like it was inspired by a video game. I'm not going to rant about video games, because I love playing them. I'd be a complete hypocrite if I sat here and denigrated video games for the detriment they do versus their positive aspects. Apparently, somewhere in middle America, two late adolescents beat a young girl to death demonstrating martial arts from a video game on her.
I've read before that the adolescent brain hasn't fully developed into a fully functional decision making machine yet. So, the question is, where does the fault of the parent end and the fault of the perpetrator in such a crime begin. The establishment has chosen to lay the blame at the foot of the perpetrators, rather the adolescents, who beat the 7-year old to death. But, what blame should be placed upon the guardians of those adolescents? They are not of legal age, they were drinking, and apparently unattended by someone who could check their behavior.
I, much like you, was a teenager once. I know I made my share of terrible descisions. Heck, I made some terrible decisions even into my adult life. Yet, I always had the tools necessary to made good choices where another person's life, personal belongings, close personal ties, and basically where the "Ten Commandments" are concerned. But, in the case above, it makes you wonder who was really responsible for the outcome of this terrible situation.
You have the creator of the video game. But, blaming them is the wrong choice. Video games offer a great diversion to people who need an occasional escape. They're an artistic form created by exceptionally talented people. In some ways, no different than some of the more risque painters of the Renaissance era whose works were contrary to the social mores of the day.
You have the kids. They had very limited decision making skills. Their concepts of the durability of the human body is likely marred by their experiences with video games, movies, television, and their chance exposure to a well-informed health class in the educational system. Kids these days are surrounded by images of indestructibles. Figures who take damage after damage and prevail, characters who die and are immediately reborn, digitized moments of imagined lives with unlimited immortality.
Then, there are the guardians. Who was responsible to see that these adolescents, more so, that the seven-year old girl was being protected. Those guardians, who put that Pandora's Box of technology into the hands of the brains that were still forming, minds whose basic framework for decision-making was still being connected.
At one point in life, you start to see the wisdom behind some of the choices that the establishment makes to protect the population as a whole.
Our freedoms we experience are fleeting, while technology is expanding. If the balance soon does not reveal itself, if we don't take the responsibility for our freedoms, technology will eventually outstrip those freedoms. We shackle ourselves to machines daily, whether it is a television, a computer, a video game system, an mp3 player, or a cell phone, our interconnected, over-stimulated world hasn't got the ability any longer to make the basic choices to exist.
That seems to be a huge problem looming on the horizon for the human race.
Read the story about the Teens here..
