Our Emotional Relationship to Technology
I am constantly trying to assess and reassess my emotional relationship to technology. Looking at our emotional relationship to technology, I believe, will be a lot like us assessing our emotional relationship to art. This is just the next manifestation of it.
I think “our emotional relation to images” will likely be a field for humans to study for as long as humanity exists.
I talked previously about a virtual reality experience that I had, and the genuine emotions that I felt because of it. I felt relaxed when I was “in nature”. I felt scared when I “fell off a building”, etc. But recently, I realized how gradual our perceiving of images has been. We didn’t go from analyzing renaissance paintings to virtual reality experiences in a single leap. That took centuries of incremental progress. Two reasons why it is catching us off-guard now are because the pace has quickened and the realism has improved.
The Power of Cinema
I recently saw the opening scene of the movie 28 Weeks Later. It involves a man desperately abandoning his wife and escaping a rural cottage that has been overrun with people infected with a virus. The zombies then chase him in a cinematic way through a field until he narrowly escapes by boat. My heart was absolutely pounding. I couldn’t look away, even though I wanted to.
I didn’t need virtual reality in that instance to elevate my blood pressure. The movie scene was enough. And I was hooked within seconds.
I don’t think we as a society thought much about our emotional interpretation of movies because at the time this movie came out, for example (2007), we could just shut off the DVD player and go outside. We could forget about it. But now in the modern world, scary or inciteful images seem ever-present. And they are closer and more realistic.
Assessing the Effect Movies Have on Us
Sure, since the dawn of cinema, there have always been movie critics, but I find that those analyses typically focus on the artistic elements of the piece, not our individual feelings toward it. People were certainly not taught to examine their emotional interpretation of movies on a societal level. You were only taught to do this through studying film theory or media psychology; which have been fairly niche subjects.
If you did a deep-dive into your emotional interpretation of movies in a casual conversation, you would probably be perceived as weirdly pedantic and obsessed with cinema. People would tell you, “Whoa, calm down. It’s just a movie, mate”. Any discussion or examination of it was in a high-level way.
I have been affected in lifelong ways by certain movies. I have just never thought to put my thoughts together to admit that.
I watched The Exorcist when I was around 13 and am still scared by it. I watched The Land Before Time when I was a kid and am still sad about it. I watched The Lord of the Rings when I was 10 and am still in awe of it. If I was affected by these movies in ways that still influence me decades later, I wonder how affected I am being by present-day imagery.
The Evolving Nature of Video Games
When video games first changed from Pac-Man– style gaming to Call of Duty– style gaming, people were worried that the violence would affect the people playing it. But there is insufficient evidence showing that video games cause criminal violence (according to the American Psychological Association). In fact, violence in young people has been decreasing, while violent video game usage has been increasing.
There are some reports of increased short-term aggression among those who play video games, but this rarely leads to real-world violence and may be caused by a variety of factors. For example a young boy might increase his video game usage to help him get through his parents’ messy divorce. Which of those things (or perhaps both) is causing the behavioural problems? Perhaps it is worthwhile to examine not just our interpretation of images but also our uses of technology and what role it is filling for us emotionally.
Illusions That We Accept
But I think technology has collectively caught us off guard. We get surprised when a person playing a virtual reality game accidentally punches the person standing beside them or when smart people fall for a deepfake. We think: how did we get here?
But movies are in a way a type of deepfake. The only difference is that movies don’t pretend to be real. They are imaginary and we know it, so there is no deception. Even if they are based on a true event, they are not claiming to actually have filmed that event. We know they were filmed on a set. But they are still drawing us into an illusion. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been emotionally affected by them for almost all of our lives.
What Comes Next?
If movies and games have shaped our inner worlds for decades, how might AI-generated imagery, deepfakes, and virtual spaces shape us in the decades ahead?
Messy Bun Book Lover
(Originally posted on July 4, 2025)