Talk:Dehumanization
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Text described by The Anome as weird paranoid stuff and removed by him/her:
- The empirically supported propaganda model of Herman and Chomsky shows how corporate media are able to carry out large-scale, successful dehumanization campaigns when that is in the interests (profit-making) that the corporations are legally obliged to maximise. Government-controlled media, in either democracies or dictatorships, are also capable of carrying out dehumanization campaigns, to the extent with which the population is unable to counteract the dehumanizing memes.
i'm putting this back in. If the Anome or anyone else wants to claim that empirical research is paranoid, then please actually read the research by Herman and Chomsky first. It's not paranoid, it's empirical research (external to the wikipedia) which has a simple explanation. Boud 18:27, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I am not sure if this is a flavour of dehumanisation, but do the following situations qualify as cases of it?:
- Scruffy homeless person collapses in railway station; people ignore him, give a wide berth and carry on their buisness.
- A car driver shouts abuse at another motorist who got in his way; he would be be more polite if he encoutered the same person on a pavement who bumped into him.
- Some people engage in internet trolling but are polite and helpful to members of the community they interact with directly.
In each case an individual or group is treated with disdain or contempt under specific conditions. In general, people behaved less compassionately in large crowds or where anonymity or lack of reprisals applied. If this is a topic of dehumanisation, it should be added to the article.--ChrisJMoor 03:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
I wasn't sure on where the sources were, but a classmate of mine could have used some... isn't there a reference section? (I wrongfully called for sources on deindividuation, meant for this article).
In any case... yeah.
- In a sense, technology can cause an illusion of dehumanization either by eroding the traditional privacy in our daily lives or by informing us of how the progress of science and rationalism tends to challenge our comforting notions of religion and humanity. The loss of privacy, especially that due to information technology, when shared by all, is not viewed as dehumanizing per se. In the extreme, posting everyone of ourselves in MRI scan, nude and accompanied by our genotype, would not dehumanize any one person, but it be viewed by some as dystopic as in the film The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. In the case of religion, for instance, the progress made by Nicolaus Copernicus (and Galileo Galilei), Hilaire Rouelle, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and James D. Watson or even Hippasus was met with negative emotions in the fashion of the Luddites because such progress via science shattered naive notions that have been conceived of based on emotions such as Narcissism and, to a lesser degree, the many implications of creationism and benevolence. Freud, in particular, gave us a better understanding that our logical conscious and our emotional unconscious were in a dynamic equilibrium with each other, thereby challenging prior notions about what makes any one person's action or decision not strictly rational and not more or less dehumanizing. In that same sense, the Internet and society itself can appear to be dehumanizing if we allow it to make us to feel like a small and replaceable component of some larger machine. If we were treat others as if they were such, then that would be dehumanizing on our part.
Is it just my interpretation, or does this entire paragraph seem to be loaded with biases? For instance, by stating in the first sentence that technology causes an 'ilusion' of dehumanization, it arguably dismisses any notions that genuine dehumanization can be caused by technology. Several statements throughout seem to be worded in a fairly biased manner, such as regarding beliefs held prior to certain scientific discoveries as naive notions that have been concieved of based on emotions such as Narcissism, which appears to infer that all primitive attempts to understand our surroundings were motivated by a desire to place ourselves in a state of central importance to the world (the context of narcissism here seems to be used in a disparaging manner, at least to me). It would also seem that by saying that Freud gave us a better understanding of the human mind presents his ideas on the unconscious as indesputable. However, I would like to have other interpretations on this. 74.67.115.198 05:19, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
- To clarify, I am by no means trying to propose that technology is inherently dehumanizing, or to deny that, if looked at in a certain way, certain discoveries could be interpreted as devaluing human importance, or to ignore the adverse effects that certain religous traditions have had on society. All I am trying to bring to question is whether or not this paragraph infers that ceratin technological advances only appear to have dehumanizing effects, that certain discoveries will always lead people to find their lives less meaningful, that religous tradition is inherently unreasoning, or if any other personal opinions are presented as fact, if the alleged biases are in fact lacking in evidence enough to be considered personal opinions. 74.67.115.198 06:08, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
