It is easy to blame the misuse of crazes such as Pokémon Go on many factors. We can wring our hands and blame software developers or kids, bad parenting and educational systems, insensitivity or the digital media. I will blame the misuse on a lack of 
ethics that runs through the core of America. We are rapidly losing our touch with reality.
Pokémon Go is a highly interactive game targeted towards adolescents and teens. Is it addictive? I would hate to blame Pokémon Go alone. There are a myriad of digital distractions that have consumed adolescents and teens, but I might also make a good argument that the world has become so consumed with staring into little screens as a greater and greater percentage of our existence that many of us are now inside our screens looking out.
I have said this before and it bears repetition: the digital world in which so many of us play is infinite. Life is finite. No one, certainly not the companies who make our devices or the software programs ever suggests that maybe we should put down our devices and explore “real,” and maybe that is not their jobs. However, they can tell us or suggest to us that some digital behaviors border on the unethical.
Pokémon Go is not the ethical problem. How and where the software is used is the issue. It has already been suggested that Pokémon Go may be used by child predators for the purpose of luring children. If it has been suggested, it may very well happen. However (and here is where the ethical part comes into play), Arlington National Cemetery and the U.S. Holocaust Museum (among others) have pleaded with kids to stop playing the game on their grounds and exhibits.
Ethically, should such reminders extend to other venues? Would you be bothered by kids playing Pokémon Go at your father’s funeral? How about kids running through the Louvre as you view an exhibit of impressionists or hearing them scream with delight at finding a digital image during a requiem mass?
There is a time and a place for everything, so why aren’t adults teaching children about the ethical consequences of misusing digital technology? Because I truly believe that many adults are as far removed from reality as their children.
Cher
Not long ago, 70 year-old Cher sent out a “tweet” on Twitter. This occurred immediately after the suicide bombing in the Istanbul airport in which close to 50 human lives were lost. She “wrote” the following: “WE ALL PRAY FOR INNOCENT PPL IN TURKEY AIRPORT”
To emphasize her “sorrow,” she used emoji’s of a bomb and then an exploding bomb.
When the social media exploded that the emoji images were insensitive, she supposedly sent another tweet:
“Been thinking about my Poorly Placed, Insensitively Timed ‘bomb Emoji’. No Excuse,” she wrote using a broken heart emoji. “I’m Used 2 Using Emoji 2Help Say More Than 140 Letters. Sorry.”
Then hours later she sent out yet another tweet:
“No Twts 2day (she sent one anyway!), Cause, Wanted2 Think About Sensitivity. Meant No Disrespect, But That’s Not Enough. DOWN A FEW PEGS, IS OK #WalkAMileInTheirShoes.”
As I read the tweets, I wondered “why.” I wondered, of course, if she wrote them at all or if it was a digital media assistant, or perhaps the assistant wrote the first and Cher tried to cover her tracks with the second and third, complete with an idiotic hashtag.
Is the 70 year-old trying to show the world she is still relevant and “hip” by using social media? Walk a mile in their shoes, Cher? Really? Why not donate some of your fortune to the International Red Cross? Why not understand that 50 deaths and numerous, permanent injuries cannot be minimized with exploding digital images. In other words, grow up in an ethical sense. Come back to reality.
Not one of those people
None of us can halt time or “progress.” None of us can return to yesterday or yesteryear for that matter. Society has created a digital world and it has revolutionized our world. It can be used for great good, and certainly for fun. As new as Pokémon Go may be (it will be replaced by something else), and as ridiculous as emoji may be in expressing real thought, we cannot replace reality and responsibility with the digital and dispassionate.
Ethics keeps us all grounded. In asking ourselves, “Is this ethical?” we might not be so blind to our children overrunning the hallowed ground of Arlington or making light of an awful tragedy to try to convince the world we are still a relevant part of that world.
Ethics matter – and they are as real as they can be.
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