Internet Morality Lecture

I have a lot of thoughts in the morning about all kinds of things. Maybe it’s because I spend an hour doing mostly physical things like showering, making breakfast, cleaning, and going to school. Someday I would like to try recording my thoughts as they come in the morning. The problem is that I think this will take time, so ideally I would do it when I don’t have work. But if I don’t have work, I’m unlikely to have the same kind of routine, and therefore I won’t have many thoughts. It’s kind of a catch-22.

This morning there was a lecture about internet morality at the junior high school. The speaker said some really thought-provoking (刺激的な?) things. Some of them would not be well received by an American audience. For example, he said that “if you do something bad in Japan, you’ll definitely be caught.” This was mainly within the context of internet crime, but even there I think it’s a stretch to tell a bunch of junior high students something that is so unlikely to be true. Another one of his points was that we ought to think about how others feel when we show them how much fun we’re having. When we brag about traveling or having a nice smartphone or computer, think about the feelings of people who can’t have those things. I appreciate this thought, but I’m sure it would encounter a lot of resistance in America.

The speaker had some good ideas too, though. His keyword was 置換的思考力--the ability to exchange ways of thinking. Normally I would think that the internet would facilitate the exchange of different ideas, and I still think that it can. But the speaker made a good point that people with similar ways of thinking tend to gather together, and the internet certainly does make that easier as well. Then, he said, if these people continue to associate with each other, one begins to think that everyone has the same thoughts, and therefore one can become dismissive when encountering a different perspective because most of one’s interactions are with that group of people with the same perspective.

I think this is true outside the internet as well, in a school. It’s quite common for students to only interact with other similarly-aged students (in similar situations) as peers. Teachers and parents are authority figures, and because of that there might be resistance to their ideas. It would be nice if students could exchange ideas on an even level with a greater variety of people. In America this probably tends to happen at university. I think it would be beneficial for middle and high school students to be exposed to this sooner, first so that they might not be so strongly influenced, and secondly so that they can appreciate their present life more.

Because of this lecture, I also resolved to be more careful with digital information. I am usually conscientious about it, but now I think I should be more cautious about using real names and signing up for questionable websites. Not that I do that much, but I think I have done it in the past.

Saturday I went to the Halloween festival in Shiojiri. It was fun to see so many of my students, although I didn’t know what to say to them most of the time, and somehow I kept forgetting that it would probably be okay to speak Japanese (especially if they weren’t trying to speak English). Oh well. That night I went to D’s apartment for a game night. We ended up playing Streets of Rogue, which was hilarious at times and a bit tedious at others. It seems like a great co-op video game, but there was something that didn’t feel quite right about it somehow. Maybe because we didn’t split the roles very well and were more content with chaos. Anyway, after that we talked and watched a few youtube videos until 3:30 AM. That’s the latest I’ve stayed up this year probably, and I wasn’t even that sleepy until I got home. The next day though I was a zombie in the afternoon, so much that I decided to cancel my climbing session.

I spent most of my free time on Friday and Saturday on Oxygen Not Included, but somehow on Sunday I decided that I had had enough and I wanted to do something more real. I went to Cainz Home to search for inspiration, but didn’t find anything. I finished the day playing Streets of Rogue until a bit late, but I managed to unlock the last two characters and I discovered something that should make future runs a bit more fun. However, I’m hoping that when I get tired of that (which should be soon) I’ll be able to find something more realistic. For example, I enjoyed listening to the lecture today and writing my thoughts about it—it would be nice if I could do something like that every day, or at least every other day. It seems unlikely though. Also, I need to study for the JLPT.