Serial commentators and inhumanity. The effect of the techno-mediated? Social networks and newspapers have published and disseminated images of a drunk boy struggling with an improvised climb on the facade of a building in Naples. The unstable young man falls and on impact with the ground breaks his legs. That a drunk boy tries to try his hand at some crazy “enterprise”, especially if he is in a context out of his ordinary, with an audience that encourages him to perform a certain action and films his heroic deeds, does not seem particularly to me. striking.
We know perfectly well that alcohol abuse and the influence of the context can also lead a person to go beyond his limits, without having the real perception of the risks and consequences that he will face. There are too many drunk kids who end up in hospital, even if the newspapers don’t mention them. And when the newspapers do not talk about it, it seems that the problem does not exist, but alcohol does much more damage than social challenges or challenges. The comments I read under the various posts in which the boy’s images were published made me think a lot. Obviously those present immediately sent the videos made to channels and pages, with thousands of followers, which report the worst sides of being more or less human. Do you think that the ambulance could not pass because the crowd could not lose their seat in the front row and had to enjoy the show.
Everyone stops there so as not to miss a moment of the scene, to film and have that moment of popularity on the web and to be able to say: “I sent that video”, “I did it”, “they published my video”. And in the meantime, a person is lying on the ground with broken legs waiting for help. Pain is a spectacle, suffering is a spectacle. You get a lot of views with these videos because people have to satisfy their curiosity.
Many comments made fun of a potential death, jokes after jokes about whether he broke his legs or didn’t die because of his imbecility. A disarming coldness in speaking of a life, of a person who, although he will not win the intelligence award of the year, is still a person who has risked dying. You look at the action and not the person. It is published driven by an almost compulsive automatism, without thinking before doing: first you do it and then you think. Where there is no thought, there are unreasonable actions and acting out.
This constant and continuous need to comment on videos and photos online and this living life filtered from one screen is facilitating a process of dehumanization of the other: we are now used to “describing the scene” as if we were looking at an image, as if we were talking about objects and not about people, and we also do it in reality, as if we were always in front of our screen. The problem is that younger people grow up in this context and learn to relate to others in the same way they use with smartphones, because today everything is techno-mediated, including relationships and feelings. The techno-interposition guides our way of life, even if we don’t realize it. It is fashion, fashion and model.
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