Home For Fiction – Blog

for thinking people

Patreon LogoPatreon

dehumanization

Digital Dehumanization: the Dark Side of the Internet

January 15, 2019

The term digital dehumanization might sound obscure. It surely sounds bad, and referring to the dark side of the internet makes it worse. But what do we mean by digital dehumanization, and what does the internet have to do with it?

The term dehumanization refers to the process of depriving a person or a group of persons the qualities of being human. Take a look at my article on zombies and dehumanization. I wrote back then:

The thoroughly disturbing aspect in all this is the concept of Dehumanization. If you’re interested, read Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century to see how it works. Basically, you convince a group of people – normal, everyday people like you and me – that another group of people are not really humans. Then, it becomes far easier to convince the first group to turn on the second. This is how the Holocaust happened, this is how Hiroshima happened, this is how My Lai, Bosnia, and Rwanda happened.

Let’s begin to unpack the process of digital dehumanization – a dehumanization process occurring digitally, on the internet – with a little hypothetical scenario. It will perhaps set up the tone for today’s article.

digital dehumanization
Digital dehumanization is about not seeing the person behind the mask of the internet
(more…)

Zombies and Dehumanization

December 17, 2017

The ideas explicated in the following text might to an extent be embarrassingly obvious to many fans of zombie narratives or experienced literature students and academics. But allow me to speculate that there is a significant number of people who have not considered these ideas. It is for their benefit I offer the following short analysis of what zombies can stand for.

Zombies invading your literature
Zombies are a popular topic of today’s narratives. Have you wondered why?
(more…)