Escaping Reality

Although the internet has served humankind in terms sharing information, storing human knowledge indefinitely, and facilitated our lives in many other aspects, it has also given rise to many unintended consequences. I was surfing through the internet on virtual worlds and came across an article that really disturbed me. So it turns out that there was a Korean couple that very addicted to a virtual reality game called Prius Online. Because of this addiction, the couple would spend long hours playing in this fantasy world completely forgetting about everything in their external world: the real world. The couple had a young baby girl whom they completely forgot to feed one time because they were just so invested in this virtual world and she died of starvation. It is really sad for me to hear that anybody would that to their own child. You can read more of the story by clicking here. I also, in the same article, read about two other disturbing occurrences. One was about a 22-year-old man who killed his own mother simply because she would continuously nag at him for playing too many games and spending too much time on them as well. The other occurrence was about a boy who went into cardiac arrest and died because he played StarCraft for so long. From personal experience and from my peers experiences I know that a lot of websites, such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and many others as well, are very addicting websites. And it is this theme of internet and virtual reality addiction that I would like to bring into question. Since the internet is already revolutionizing the way we communicate with each other effectively affecting and changing the way we perceive and interpret the world around us, how will that affect us morally? A lot of us invest great amounts of time and energy to such virtual realities in order to escape from the so-called real world. But how much is too much? Also, as the borderline between what the "virtual" world and what the "real" world becomes ever so thin and hazy to identify, how do we respond to occurrences such as the parent's who let their little girl starve to death? Do we simply blame the parent's and castigate them for such actions? Or should we look at it in a different way and see that we as a society are essentially slowly allowing this system to generate more and more people who are more willing to escape their realities in order to invest the greater amounts of time and energy to such virtual realities? I would like to think that people are smart enough to be able to figure out how much is too much. But the fact of the matter is that we are now having the newer generations being born into this virtual system and to them this is what reality is. Therefore, I believe that future generations are going to have a harder time finding this borderline between what is reality and what is not. And if this system can drive a man to kill his own mother at this day in age, who knows what the future will have in store for us.