A colleague made a referral to one of my daily obsessions that had me checking out the site sooner then I had planned. Penny Arcade had an interesting topic for it’s latest comic depicting images construed from the video imbedded in this post (entitled “Moral Combat”). While I found the comic (as always) quite hilarious, I was quite disconcerted by the video.



Basically, the premise of video is to display how video games are the cause of everything from the World Trade Center terrorist attacks to the Columbine shootings. It displays children as mindless automatons who have free access to very mature video game content that fills their empty heads with a very numb view of violence, the knowledge of how to utilize weapons for violent behavior, and a desire to use this knowledge on the people around them. I find irony in the absence of any reference to parents, parenting, or parental control.

This, however, is not my primary reason for posting, but is what prompted a conversation that I had later that afternoon with another of my colleagues which focused more on the general affect of Technology on today’s society. While he did not convey any from of agreement for the overbearing, nonfactual Moral Combat video, he did pose a rather convincing argument on the negative affects that technology is having on society.

The basic premise of his argument focused on how, technology has begun to weaken our culture on a physical and social level. Being that I have based a career in Technology this was not an idea that I was going to accept easily. However, brining up legitimate examples such as the growing obesity of our children and a growing trend of people whose primary social experiences are found in online communities, he began to catch my attention a bit. While the ideas he expressed are a far cry from calling video games the bane of our existence, I found myself compelled to agree that today’s generation feels less connected to their local community. The world has grown smaller, making the feeling of anonymity stronger and sense of individualism less distinct. An interesting question was posed: who is the Einstein, Beethoven, Picasso, or Franklin of today? When I try to answer this question, I think of entrepreneurs…the Bill Gates and Donald Trumps, but I cannot think of anyone who has made such an astounding mark on society to be named with those listed above. I do not believe that this is because those great minds don’t exist, but that these individuals have to fight a society that rewards anonymity as the technology that the society survives on works best when things conform to a standard.

Maybe the technology that helps society survive is also a bane. Maybe…but that thought is not going to stop me from expressing it via this technological medium.