We have talked about the present day Hearts of Darkness, touching on the Middle East and certain Chicago neighborhoods, but I think a huge heart of darkness that we are exposed to every day is technology. That is not to say that things like phones and Facebook don't have their advantages, but I think that many harmful effects of technology are ignored.
People often get so consumed in our phones that they live their lives looking at their phones instead of what's going on around them. Recently, many people have been publicly rejecting social media, saying that the world it is portraying isn't true. But so many people are caught up in the world of social media that it can be difficult to define how much of what we see on social media is true. We look at the world through a warped lens in a similar way that the Europeans view the Congo. They see only parts of it and have pre-concieved notions of what is true based on sources that are biased.
There is also a kind of dehumanization that occurs on social media. Since we have gotten so used to communicating with people without hearing tone of voice or seeing their reaction, it has gotten easy to pretend like the person on the receiving end of a message or a comment isn't a person with real feelings and thoughts. This impersonal form of communication parallels with the interaction the Europeans have with Africans in Heart of Darkness. To start, there is close to no face to face interaction between Europeans and Africans, so they have not had the experience of getting to know one another as humans instead of as stories and rumors. All of Marlow's impressions of the Africans seem to come second hand since he never actually talks to them, and his observational skills can only tell him so much.
We get caught up in our own world the same way the Europeans do in Heart of Darkness, except we manage to dehumanize people that we often see as equals, people that we may even know personally, but allow ourselves to see them as less human when we view them through a screen.
This was a really interesting blog post. I completely agree with your idea that technology can be a heart of darkness. I never really think about how technology dehumanizes people and I thought this post really brought it to my attention.
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