"Awakenings" and its connections

While watching the movie "Awakenings" with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams yesterday it seemed pretty relevant to the idea of trances brought on by technology, trances like we watched in the video of people's faces as they played video games.  This movie is about Robin Williams and his effort to help a group of people who have been catatonic for many years after suffering from an encephalitis epidemic. A new doctor in a psychiatric ward, Robin Williams' character is disturbed by the amount of comatose patients who have had no sense of hope for the majority of their lives.  Robin Williams is convinced that these people are living inside and works to find a drug to bring them out of their comatose states. Over time Williams' character finds a chemical that is able to bring one of the patients out of his coma named L-Dopa.  This chemical continues to work but must keep being administered to the patient to keep them out of their coma. Over continued use the drug is less effective and the patient needs more and more of the drug to stay out of their normal catatonic state.

This movie got me thinking about the trance like states brought on by engaging with different forms of media.  When listening to radio, watching television or playing a video game it can be seen that a human gets in some sort of trance even if it is very subtle.  The intensity of the trance is due to the reality of the media that one is engaged in.  Because a book on tape or a story told over the radio is easy to dismiss as not real, the trance it brings on is perhaps less intense than the heavy trance sometimes brought on by very realistic video games or a 3-d movie.  In the video of people playing video games watched in class some of the kids seemed to be in a very heavy trance. For example the child who's eyes were watering was in such a heavy trance that he would not even blink when his eyes needed moisture. Other kids in the video were effected differently by interacting with media, such as the boy who was muttering almost about stabbing and killing.  No matter what kind of state of mind a realistic form of media puts a human in, the human on the receiving end of the media becomes farther and farther away from real life.  Even though the argument could be made that a trance state that a video game brings on is an equal form of life as walking around and engaging with the natural environment, I do not think it is.  If someone believes this is true than they would also believe that spending 16 hours a day playing World of Warcraft would be more worthwhile than reading a book.

If human daily involvement with technology continues to become more realistic, the catatonic states of humans will also deepen.  If humans enter deep comatose states due to increased realistic technology it is no different than the group of catatonic humans living in a psychiatric ward in "Awakenings."  On a large scale, this would lead to a nation full of comatose humans living in another world, away from their human bodies and possibly only able to be woken up by a huge dose of L-Dopa.