Of the many historic firsts marked by Tuesday’s inauguration, one of the least compelling is the fact that we now have a Crackberry addict as our commander-in-chief. Shameless e-mail checkers and headline watchers around the country were validated as Obama’s assumption of the highest position in the land signaled the official enshrinement of the Web-and-media culture that defines so many Americans.

As college students, we are perhaps the most egregiously screen-glued set. Hardly an hour passes without an update from our inbox or a glance at our website of choice, and it seems that patterns of TV- and computer-watching have altogether replaced the circadian rhythm as the day’s schedule-maker. And like most technological advances, this tuned-in lifestyle is both a blessing and a curse.

Communication and learning have been sped up to near instantaneity, allowing people to get things done and keep abreast of world developments faster than ever before. But besides the oft-lamented detachment from real human contact that this new life entails, our technological immersion has also deadened us to human tragedy. Horrors of epic scale have now become little more than opportunities for 30-second voyeurism, and with tsunamis, genocides and executions pressing themselves on our attention with the regularity of sneezes or snack breaks, the sensational has been reduced to the mundane.

Over winter break, Israel invaded Gaza in a spectacular show of force that quickly resulted in untold suffering and the deaths of hundreds of civilians. Thanks to legions of reporters and the lag-less nature of today’s news, I sat at home keeping tabs on the missile strikes and ground invasion even as I munched on Smartfood and texted friends.

I would read a few chapters from a novel and check out the latest pictures of grieving mothers; I would run an errand and see which family compound had been destroyed in the meanwhile. In a postmodern moment worthy of a 20th century sci-fi film, I was even around to watch as the Israeli Defense Force uploaded videos of missile strikes hours after they happened. Needless to say, the initial disgust I felt was soon transformed into a perverse curiosity.

This type of emotional detachment is hardly unusual for the contemporary news consumer. Remember the live shots of people jumping from the Twin Towers? How about the bombing of Baghdad? Or the rapidity with which Saddam Hussein’s execution was featured on YouTube?

World events, many of them historic and epoch-making, are now simultaneously media events, occupying the same position once reserved for performances or sports games. With overexposure to global happenings, there is an inevitable slackening of novelty or reflection, and one man’s misery becomes another’s mid-lunch entertainment. The distinction between event and spectacle quickly disappears, and the capacity for moral outrage fades with it.

What with all this change, one might expect that the screen-filled media age marks a distinct break with the past and its attitudes towards pain and suffering. But no: irony has the final say. Even as atrocities and evils scream at us from our laptops and cell phones, the misery continues unabated; defying logic, people confronted with the terrible consequences of their actions persist in the same despicable behaviors. It’s a sober commentary on human nature that even when our enemies are given high-resolution, full-color faces, we do no better than Cain and Abel.

But I’ll spare the moralizing. I, perhaps more than most, am guilty of browser-hopping from famines to Facebook and from miseries to music reviews. It’s worth noting, however, that this is a distinctly Western phenomenon. The same civilization that engineered the technology to kill innocents on a mass scale and set in motion many of the events leading to today’s inequalities, has now provided the means to watch these horrors from a comfortable reclining chair.

Are we, the especially media-addicted college students who are expected to carry on the work of this civilization, morally equipped to fix these mistakes? Are we so anaesthetized to human suffering that we won’t care to stop it?

There’s something to be said for spectator innocence, of course. Awareness does not always correlate with culpability, and the sudden appearance of 24-hour news cycles and Twitter updates hardly means that any act of war or natural deprivation is a stain on its witnesses’ souls. We are not all bombing hospitals or sending soldiers out to die.

But we shouldn’t let ourselves off the hook too easily. There’s no denying the sickening quality of our media age’s voyeuristic aloofness and the bystander indifference it begets. The new media age has merely alerted us to what has always been happening, and we must respond to that newfound knowledge accordingly. In the end, perhaps the best that can be said for us modern tragedy-watchers is that ignorance was bliss.