Bruce Bisset: Technology pushing us apart

Seems  to me too many people are going from looking forward to staring blankly at life and are becoming desensitised to their own humanity.
In part because in the hurdy-gurdy pace of modern existence there can be too few minutes left in a day to devote to friends and family the quality time needed to maintain meaningful loving connections.
Instead people choose to substitute those connections with the virtual realities of texting and tweeting and online social sites - which really aren't social at all, because "meetings" take place in a non-physical environment.
Even a videocall is an impersonal experience, lacking the depth and empathy of speaking face to face; we are set apart from a true measure of interaction when we rely on a machine to crop and transmit.
As much as our gadgets have shrunk the global village into a virtual room, ironically in concert they are acting to distance us from our fellows.
If the result is to make us increasingly insular and phobic, wary of real human contact and fundamentally divorced from any genuine appreciation of community, then by choosing to turn from the real to the virtual, our humanity is being diminished.
Now, it's true that there are many initiatives being taken that, on the face of it, suggest otherwise.
Online petitions, for example. Save Miss X from execution. Pressure country Y to vote yes. Protect species Z from over-zealous exploitation.
Worthy and useful means of making a difference, sure.
But by opting in to this world-wide feast of any and every issue, are we coincidentally opting out of the local and the personal and the over-the-fence neighbourliness that used to be the norm? On the evidence, yes.
That evidence manifests in a number of ways.
For example, tune to any channel after 9pm and sex and violence, frequently together, is the standard fare.
Moreover it is starkly graphic to the point of grotesque; criminals not only perform the most heinous crimes before your eyes, you are shown how to go about doing these crimes yourself in sordid detail.
We're told these are the things viewers wish to see. Which viewers? Presumably those who are so desensitised by such a constant diet they can no longer distinguish between healthy and degenerate, and either cannot imagine or do not care that these scenes will have any lasting impact.
So they allow their children to sit and watch, regardless of "adults only" warnings - thus implicitly sanctioning these programmes. Little wonder young and troubled souls go out and copycat exactly what they've witnessed.
Noticed how many sex crimes are now being committed by children who have not yet reached puberty? A 10-year old in Hastings, just the other day; how many hours of after-9 screentime has he absorbed?
Bashings, stabbings, random murders; more prevalent because the perpetrators are lacking real connection to their own and others' feelings, and find it all too easy to treat their victims as fantasy objects? Yes; I'd say so. As will most psychologists, if asked.
But we don't ask, do we. We don't really want to know. Rather, we don't want to admit that we are poisoning our children with images of bestial horror that they are far too young and impressionable to shrug off.
If anyone is old and callous enough to shrug some of that stuff off. At least we might have the sense to change channels.
Jack Johnson, one of a small breed of light-pop protest singers of note, has a current hit song about this, where the cameraman and the network and the advertiser all deny responsibility by claiming they're only giving the public what they want.
Hopefully, people will not only hear the song but recall its lyrics next time they sit to watch a programme that goes beyond the bounds of even poor taste, and choose not to by switching off. Instead of switching themselves off and blankly absorbing.
But I fear the target audience - the young and socially inept - are already too desensitised and too ill-governed to be self-responsible enough to take control and reach for the remote.
And the farther remote they become, the more likely technology will prove a curse for humanity, rather than a blessing.
That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.