Remote Intimacy

after reading the chapter titled “Remote Intimacy” in the book titled “Drone: Remote Control Warfare” (Gusterson, 2015), i felt surprised that some people enjoy watching people die that much, especially Americans when they enjoy innocent civilians of Afghanistan or Iraq. Almost two months ago, when the massacre of the New Zealand happened and someone sent me the video i felt disgusted and irritated. Not just because Muslims were dying but also because this was real life. Even though i enjoy playing video games including violence, i know that this is a game and i’m not hurting anyone. However, i do believe that a person really thinks that he is the one in the screen and instinctively try for survival which actually happens to me and a lot of my friends when we’re playing video games. Furthermore, as i mentioned many times in class before i think that our relationships with technology and especially our phones nowadays are unnatural. so, when i found out that drone operators feel that they have a connection with the people they are watching, it creeps me out. Mainly because this drone operator is sitting thousands of miles away in an office looking at a screen, while invading other people’s privacy without their permission to the extent that they would watch the civilians have sex with their wives. Which to me is a new level of invading privacy. In addition, i think the concept of voyeurism is sick and demented to be applied here in this context as watching someone die through a screen shouldn’t be fun or amusing, it should be horrifying and traumatizing. As for the remote narrativization, it is fully understandable and relate able because everybody tries to put a face on the unknown and a story to the stranger. We do it in movies, Youtube clips and pictures just to satisfy our curiosity. However, the stress results from killing all these people especially civilians who didn’t deserve to die. As far as i am concerned, these drone operators deserve the PTSD they suffer from.