In camera: rosy-tinted memory editing the violence of children

Here's a fascinating video about the dangers of technology. The way we can focus on technology instead of what it represents, that is.  Watch it through.  It's about a group of children and technology, and runs less than five minutes:

The speakers describe an event abetted, if not caused, by the presence of (simulated) technology.  "The [fake] camera[s] really changed the way we behaved," says the narrator. 

And yet the change described is not one I recognize.  Children watching a fight without intervening to stop it?  That's consonant with my middle-class experience of elementary school and junior high.  Heck, in junior high the kids celebrated fights.  Is the narrator recollecting a different background?

Or is he seeing the technology of representation, and not seeing what it represents?  That's a way to shift horror from human behavior onto human tools.

The narrator also offers this fascinating comment: "We lost our humanity."  It's that classic understanding of "human" as "not a tool user," or at least "not a tool user in ways we don't approve of."  Is this a post-WWII development, or does it come from an earlier source?

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Comments

[Laura]

Very interesting. Perhaps the camera put into sharp focus (pun intended) humans' ability to be cruel to one another. Had there been no camera, would he have even remembered the fight scene? I certainly remember a similar fight that no one broke up and we had no "cameras" recording the event. Weren't a lot of tools created early on in order to do harm to one another?

[Bryan Alexander]

And yet when we behold a new technology, we naturalize the older ones, removing their auras of danger. So it's the camera which gets the attention here.

I wonder if writing would have worked in a similar way, at least for memory.

[Laura (geekymom)]

Yes, wasn't Plato afraid of writing ruining education because no one would memorize anything anymore? I also wonder if the meme of technology is fearful has made it so that there is no technology that becomes naturalized.

[Bryan Alexander]

It might be a layering process over time. For instance, I can't tell you how many times people who love their cars have complained to me about too much technology. They've de-technologized their imagination of cars.

Or think of folks who want to get away from technology and get back to the land... but want to keep their radios and electrical power, or don't think of metal shovels as technology.

Step by step, perhaps, we push older technologies into the natural background.