Pamela Courtenay-Hall (2011)

Video-Gaming, Homo Digitalis, and the Internet as God in the 21^st Century (2011)

Video-gaming, cell phones, instant messaging, the Internet…educational discourse about new technology abounds with the worry that we are transforming from homo sapiens to homo digitalis, digital beings whose primary mode of interaction is not facial or manual or bodily, but digital and visual and cut off from bodily social interaction and from the natural world.  Research has even claimed changes in brain states to substantiate these concerns.  I explore the extent to which any such risk of being ‘cut off’ might be due not only to our isolation in front of computer screens, but also to the linguistic, perceptual and cognitive micro-features of video-game use…and by our being in effect repositioned in the world as creaturely fellow-users and dependents upon the vast unseen all-knowing all-powerful god of the 21^st century, the Internet.  But… advocating education over panic, I attend also to the political significations involved in the discourse of presenting video-gaming and Internet use as “addictions”.

Pamela Courtenay-Hall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Prince Edward Island.  Her research interests are in the areas of: environmental thought, feminist theory, ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of education, parenting, sexuality, and critical thinking.  She has a B.A. (Mathematics) and B. Ed. (Senior/Intermediate Mathematics and Physics) from the University of Windsor, and M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Windsor with a concentration in ethics and environmental ethics, and an M. A. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame with a concentration in philosophy of science.  Her Ph. D. in Philosophy is from the University of Toronto and her thesis title was “Ecoholism and its critics:  A critical exploration of holism in environmental ethics and the sciences of ecology”.