digital badge of courage

i should have posted my expanded thoughts on
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane sooner

because my relation of it to digital culture keeps growing.

and now i feel like i want to move on past this onto other things

to begin the expansion. or explanation. (more cause i am ready to move past this unfortunately)

in The Red Badge of Courage (to be referred as RBOC here out)
there is this theme of war being glorified
Henry wants to go to war because he has this romantic ideal
of the war being  this great glorified thing

i think we have much of this same thing with video games
i know my husband wants to be a sniper.
and would probably enroll if i would agree
video games give their players this false sense of how war actually is
which cause people to enroll without realizing what they are going into

As a RBOC can be seen as a naturalist text
there is a theme of man being at conflict with nature

It has been a couple weeks since i read this
so i refreshed on sparknotes.
they explained this theme of man vs nature best i think:

"Henry’s realization that the natural world spins on regardless of the manner in which men live and die is perhaps the most difficult lesson that Henry learns as a soldier. It disabuses him of his naïve, inexperienced beliefs regarding courage and manhood. Shortly after his encounter with the squirrel in the woods, Henry stumbles upon a dead soldier, whose rotting body serves as a powerful reminder of the universe’s indifference to human life. As the drama of the war rages on around him, Henry continues to occupy his mind with questions concerning the nature of courage and honor and the possibilities of gaining glory. Death, he assumes, would stop this drama cold. Yet, when he encounters the corpse, he finds that death is nothing more than an integral and unremarkable part of nature. As he reflects at the end of the novel: “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death.” Together, Henry’s encounters with the squirrel and the corpse form one of the most important passages in the novel, for it is here that Crane establishes the formidable opposing forces in Henry’s mind: the vain belief that human life deserves such distinctions as courage and honor, and the stark realization that, regardless of such distinctions, all human life meets the same end."

I think we often feel this way about internet, computers, etc
in the sense that we dont want the "bad," or the privacy crossing or any other negative thing
to continue and be the truth
we expect and hope for technology to change for us
when all reality it doesnt stop, it doesnt change, it keeps on keepin on
it all ends up the same in the end

depending on how you look at the novel,
Henry has a huge transformation of understanding war
he goes from this romantic ideal of wanting to go to war to be "cool"
to the stark realization of death no matter what and more understanding of war

with this I think a transition in the thought about our digital culture is coming
there are a lot of people who see this integrated technology as something "bad"
when in all reality it really is a great thing (kinda the inverse of Henry's experience)

this connection between RBOC and digital culture is kinda a hopeful one
in the sense that i hope people come to a good realization
and understanding of technology and such

with this same idea of Henry's thoughts and ideals transforming
there is a huge focus of his lack of understanding
which draws in the idea of man vs nature above

he has this lack of understanding about death, war, etc
which is a focus in the novel and one that we see change

this reminded me of beta publishing.
this idea of a focus on perhaps a lack of understanding per se
or more a lack of perfection

RBOC is also seen as a hugely influential war novel and transitory piece

i think this can just be tied to the idea
that what we have going on now is a transition
we are in a weird spot of not knowing how digital culture is going to play out
and ultimately replace the traditional
and everything that is happening now is going to influential to the future.

lastly, there is a interesting fact about RBOC
that Stephen Crane never actually went to war
yet he wrote this great and hugely influential novel
that has been accurately described as the most realistic

this brings up an interesting topic in digital culture
of not having to actually experience an event
yet still being able to experience it
are we really actually being able to experience it?

it is strange because we have Stephen Crane who becomes
a sort of expert and veteran of war yet he never went

and we can do the same thing through the internet

yet now i feel that there is more importance of actually experiencing things
because everyone can find out about it on the internet

which makes you wonder if had Crane published now
would the novel hold the same merit?

just some thoughts