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Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and his partner Choi Mi-sun, 25, fed their three-month-old baby only on visits home between 12-hour sessions at a neighbourhood internet cafe, where they were raising an avatar daughter in a Second-Life-style game called Prius online, police said. Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in the virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level. The pair became obsessed with nurturing their virtual daughter, called Anima, but neglected their real daughter, who was not named. Eventually, the couple returned home after one 12-hour session in September to find the child dead and called police. The pair were arrested on Friday after an autopsy showed that the baby died from prolonged malnutrition. |
✖ Via Telegraph.co.uk: “Korean couple let baby starve to death while caring for virtual child” Mar. 5th, 2010 |
↳Shareskandalon
Mar 15 link notes
technology
communication
kids
parent
family
Internet
addiction
death
existence
computer
user
interface
|
― I know it’s hard, Miles, but try to think of this experience as a miracle of science.
― A miracle of science is going to the hospital for a minor operation, I come out the next day, my rent isn’t months overdue. That’s a miracle of science. This is what I call a cosmic screwing. And then where am I anyhow? What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
― You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly two hundred years.
― BUT THEY ALL ATE ORGANIC RICE! |
✖ Via Sleeper, Woody Allen, 1973 Full script available over at Script-O-Rama. |
↳Shareskandalon
Feb 25 link notes
art
movie
film
filmmaker
future
science fiction
food
health
life
death
past
evolution
|
Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the “real” reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil. |
✖ Via National Review Online: “Don’t Over-Generalize From the Huntsville Murders” by David French, Feb. 18, 2010 David French starts by arguing against what he believes to be an overstatement published in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website:
“Academic life as a “petri dish for madness”? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don’t even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree.”
On one hand, French is right : to suggest that academic life alone can explain Bishop’s behavior is to give way to much importance over this single factor while ignoring others. Though it’s true there has been at least one other similar incident (Valery Fabrikant) one needs to take into account multiple factors when trying to understand Bishop’s behavior (she killed here brother in 1986, was charged with assault on another woman in 2002, etc.)
On the other hand, while French condemns what he sees as the “overstatement of the year”, he goes on suggesting that Bishop is perhaps quite simply evil… Looks like a self-contradictory argument.
More importantly, it’s emblematic of what Dana L. Cloud calls a “therapeutic discourse” that is the “dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame”. “Such discourse”, adds Cloud “emphasizes individual responsability for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems.” (“Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001” by Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud & Sharon E. Jarvis, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 2, no 1, p. 84, March 2009).
Dana L. Cloud’s book Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetorics of Therapy (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1998) is available online free of charge. |
↳Shareskandalon
Feb 22 link notes
communication
critic
murder
murderer
therapeutic
psychology
individual
society
death
destruction
analysis
study
rhetoric
