Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Cyberspace teens into unempathetic creatures: new study from grown-ups

Digital media are helping sap teenagers' empathy, according to a new study.  The study claims that teens' sense of emphathy has dropped over the past decade, and argues that various forms of digital media are to blame.

Partly it's because of the great evil that is gaming:

"In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others."

This is now a cliche, well-worn and reliable: games turning kids into monsters.

Note the collapse of all gaming into violent media.  And note the lack of any proof that violent media causes real-world violence, despite a couple of generations' worth of study; instead they fall back on the hard-to-quantify "numbness" level.

Partly the empathy crash is driven by Web 2.0, add the authors:

The recent rise of social media may also play a role in the drop in empathy, suggests O'Brien.

"The ease of having 'friends' online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline," he said.

The study also mentions tv, but the balance seems to be gaming and social media (and we can quibble that much of tv is digital, rather than otherwise, too).

Where to begin with a response?  Without having the full study to hand, we can work from that article for now.  I'd love to pore over the details.

First, note that non-digital factors don't seem to be in play.  One could argue, for instance, that a hypercompetitive market economy tends to devalue empathy (did the study cut off before the Great Recession?).  Did the rapid growth of the financial sector, say, produce more or less empathetic role models?  Did the increased scramble for jobs after the 2001 dot.com crash make teens more concerned about the feelings of others?  

Or, as one author notes, changes in child-rearing practices clearly play a role in changes in teen character (and I love her smack at The SecretTM).  Consider the self-esteem movement, for instance; does a drive to make people feel better about themselves make them care more about others?  Instead, it is, as we've long known, very easy to blame fearsome media rather than social practices.  This sometimes leads to the politically facile calls for censorship, rather than the daunting task of child-rearing and/or educational reform.

Second, let's compare other media.  Did tv make kids less empathetic before 2000, or are the authors willing to argue that there's been a huge spike upwards in violent content? (rather than violence itself, which keeps dropping, embarrassingly)  A few decades back, did movies make humans care more or less for one another?  How about books?  We have centuries, even millenia of reflections on that score.  Do any of these continue to play a role?  Are they countervailing forces?  It's curious how social media and gaming simply land on an innocent generation, warping them into monsters, while adults watch in amazement.

Third, how have these media impacted... adults?  After all, the median age of gamers is in the 30s, apparently.  And social media are generally used across age brackets.  Have grown-ups also seen their empathy sapped, or are we better stronger wiser?  (One could point out that the "those dangerous kids" mem goes back centuries, if not millenia)

Fourth, at a meta-level perhaps, we can appreciate the age of these arguments, if not the data's novelty.  The social media ironically having antisocial effects meme has been around for a while, from old criticisms that virtual communities aren't real to the "egocasting" semi-argument. 

The empathy bit has a curious ancestry, in Phil Dick's lifelong obsession with technology and empathy.  Recall the "empathy box" religion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)  Would the authors be able to imagine cases of networked technology building empathy?

I could say more, but would prefer to see the study itself.  Maybe social media could help - and I feel more callous towards you already.

(via Gardner Campbell via Twitter; photo via kodomut)

The horror that is Sex and the City 2

Ferociously bad reviews have greeted Sex and the City 2. 15% on Rotten Tomatoes! It's becoming something of a blood sport, writing up the movie's vileness. These reviews are also creative and fun to read, sometimes. 

For instance, the great Roger Ebert finds the film to be horrific in several senses, about devouring humanoids:

Some of these people make my skin crawl... Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies. They must plan their wardrobes on the phone, so often do they appear in different basic colors, like the plugs you pound into a Playskool workbench...

Like doppelgangers, or marionettes, or perhaps fembots.

Lindy West also finds horror of all kinds.

SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car... 

If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night.

Elsewhere we find the inspired claim that SatC2 is really an sf movie. Dark sf, too:

The City is Carrie Bradshaw's deathless necropolis. I liked Mannequin better. 

By designating the rest of the world as an amorphous fantasyland*, the filmmakers also juxtapose New York as the only "concrete" destination in SATC2. By removing the characters from The City for the entire movie, they see that everything outside of New York is simply a fevered opium hallucination. Once you cross the Hudson River, you transcend reality, much like H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands. 

[I]n this absolute vacuum of plot, a shadow narrative fills the void — the story of four damned immortals, condemned to live in a couture-drunk fugue state by a extradimensional puppet master (who may or may not be New York City itself). It's not much different from Dark City.

These images, scraped from the IMDB's gallery, should suit the theme.  On the left, doppelCarrie, waiting to summon up Bloody Mary from her glass.  On the right, vat-grown Carrie, newly rebuilt to transhuman specs.

The reviews also note the film's weird situation in the Great Depression.  Is it like screwball comedies of the 1930s, or simply tone-deaf and out of time?

Québécois Gothic: Monogrenade's haunted house song

Very lovely, melancholy, dreamy, Gothic little film about a haunted house, "Ce soir".

Nice use of cloudy light, mirrors, old furniture, and mist.  Monogrenade, will you keep up with this Gothic theme, please?

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Summoning Saint Death: death-worshiping drug warriors on the rise?

What happens when spreading drug war violence combines with the worship of death?  A new article in Small Wars, "The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?" (pdf), broods on what an aggressive conversion tactic suggests about new religious violence.  

Some notes follow here, as part of Infocult's focus on the Gothic in everyday life.  After all, the topic is death-worshiping underground violence.

For Gothic horror, the Small Wars article hits it right away:

instances of tortured victims and ritual human sacrifice offered up to a dark deity, respectively. Severed heads thrown onto a disco floor in Michoacan in 2005 and burnt skull imprints in a clearing in a ranch in the Yucatán Peninsula in 2008 only serve to highlight the number of such incidents which have now taken place. 

Or we can start with the Santa Muerte tradition, which goes beyond the Day of the Dead.  It seems to be an underground or simply marginal faith tradition, one growing over the past decade or so.  Santa Muerte is the Lady of Shadows, the Skinny or Boney Lady, the White Lady, holding a scythe in one hand and the Earth in the other.

Note the way Santa Muerte connects with social margins:

Most followers of Santa Muerte live on the margin of the law or outside it entirely. Many drug traffickers, mobile vendors, taxi drivers, vendors of pirated merchandise, street people, prostitutes, pickpockets and gang members... [Wikipedia]

Adherents number in the several millions.

Next, Santa Muerte streams into the current wave of Mexican drug cartel battles.  Belief is widespread enough in that world for the Bunkers to suggest that "this insurgency has at its basis a spiritual, if not religious, component".

In fact, if this connection holds, and the cartels continue to widen their conflicts, the Bunkers wonder if we'll see a growing wave of death-worshipping religious violence on both sides of the US-Mexican border.  The rise of "convert or die" tactics ("Plato o Plomo", silver=paid conversion/ lead=death) foretell an aggressive growth campaign.

One US military report thinks so, entitled "The Death Cult of the Drug Lords".

An alternative view is that the Santa Muerte faith changes once it enters the United States religious scenes.  A Los Angeles perspective sees it mellowing, become more New Agey.

Despite the startling imagery, these worshipers say, their cult is centered on love and virtue and is becoming accepted... "It is about health, prayer."

Gothic or New Age: such are the choices, sometimes.

Bonus: more on the Gothic horror aspects - 

Whereas the infamous ‘black cauldron’ incident in Matamoros in 1989, where American college student Mark Kilroy’s brain was found in a ritual nganga belonging to a local narco gang, was the rare exception, such spiritual-like activities have now become far more frequent.

(via Zenpundit)

A new robot clambers towards your dreams

Today's disturbing robot is called, charmingly, LittleDog.  Check the video for a series of ambitious, cool, and perhaps creepy ways of walking and climbing.

From this awesome USC lab.

(via Creepy Robots, of course)

Robots battling the unkillable werewolf well: mad science in the Gulf

The Gulf oil spill crisis looks a lot like a mad science tale, from one perspective.  Imagine a cross between Victor Frankenstein, shop class, and multinational companies, and you get images like this:  

It is the well that will not die.

(That's the Washington Post, not noted for its Gothic styling)

Or:

With robotic submarines, the company will sever the leaking, kinked riser pipe that emerges from the top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-tall contraption on top of the wellhead. 

Note that the cut will be made by a diamond-coated saw.

The measure of the disaster can be seen in maps the government released that show the vast amoeboid-shaped slick that has gradually glommed onto coastal Louisiana as if trying to swallow the Mississippi River delta whole.

Earlier, we saw more galumphing big science:

The cap is fitted with a grommet designed to keep out seawater and prevent the formation of slushy methane hydrates that bedeviled an earlier containment dome effort. 

Robot subs! giant mechanisms! evil undersea hydrates!  We could imagine this as lost Soviet science fiction, circa 1950.  Or a Doc Savage tale, perhaps.

Want more clearly horror-themed language?  The Post is happy to report.

"There's no silver bullet to stop this leak," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.

and

It was like hitting a Bozo punching dummy -- it goes down, then springs back up. Though some might prefer the analogy of the slasher-movie villain who always comes back for the sequel.

"This well is evil," moaned energy analyst Byron King.

(AP photo)

Gulf oil spill goes Gothic, or flinging the kill mud

The BP Gulf spill received a Gothic dimension this week, at least in political discourse.  A conservative commentator summons up horrors:

And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public's fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don't get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.

Noonan's metaphor is well-chosen, since she's arguing for the Obama administration's weakness.  She casts the crisis not as a technological problem to be solved, but as an uncanny monster to be fought, and whose persistence reveals Obama's impotence.  Expect to see more of this from the American right.

From the other side of the spectrum, Greenpeace UK's new BP logo contest has some horror-themed results:

and

BP already offers a pretty violent rhetoric, most recently using "kill mud" in a "top kill" strategy.  

(gushercam screenshot snagged from this Guardian story)

Downloading a virus into your flesh

Cyberfear staked out a new angle this week, as a British cybernetics expert claimed to have infected his body with a computer virus.  Mark Gasson implanted an RFID chip into his hand, then loaded a virus onto it.

One nice viral touch: it's not enough that Gasson gets infected.  He has to be able to pass his flesh-running program onto other machines.

The chip has allowed him secure access to his University building and his mobile phone. It has also enabled him to be tracked and profiled. Once infected, the chip corrupted the main system used to communicate with it. Should other devices have been connected to the system, the virus would have been passed on.

Fearsome media: first, there's the possibility that we'll see this story get passed around and mutated, urban legend style.  "My cousin's friend told her on Facebook that a college professor got sick from his laptop!"

Second, it serves the science fiction function of helping us think through the future.  Design fiction or proof of concept, Gasson's story makes us reflect on the human body as digital storage device.  Greg Bear did this in 1985 (Blood Music), but Gasson brings us up to date.  We have all experienced both kinds of viruses; it's only to be expected that the future remixes them.

(photo from Debs) 

Zombie snacks: teriyaki or bbq?

The tide of shambling dead reaches a new level, with zombie-themed beef jerky.  Yes.

 
 (thanks to hungry Peter Naegele)

Ontario opposes Dan Akroyd's crystal vodka skull

Dan Akroyd's skull cannot be sold in Ontario, ruled a provincial office.  

To be precise, that's Akroyd's brand of vodka, sold in a crystal skull.

 

The Board has a specific objection to the container:

"The image of the human skull was problematic for us as a responsible retailer," Layton said on Wednesday. "It's an image that is commonly associated with death or death by poison."

Fear not the skull, indeed.

But let it not be said Akroyd doesn't campaign in style:

“Saskatchewan has been a great market for us,” Mr. Aykroyd said from his “Headmobile,” a new Freightliner diesel tractor rig emblazoned with Crystal Head decals and equipped with a bedroom-office setup behind the driver’s seat, minus the long freight-carrying trailer. “It’s the fastest RV in the country, I can tell you.”