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Face it, we’ve got problems of plenty.
Plenty of pettiness, plenty of prattling.
Plenty vicious, plenty vacuous.
Plenty silly, plenty selfie.
Not so much debate, or discourse.
No witty repartees, but platitudes a-plenty.
But hey, let’s tweet, post, tag, share, like.
Let's smile into our smartphones.
Swipe left. Swipe right.
While we swear at, slam or smear
Those who beg to differ.
Let’s smile into our smartphones.
Post, tweet, tag, share, like.
Let’s smile, for we’re on social media.
A couple of months ago, a photo went viral across social media platforms — WhatsApp, Facebook. It showed some random woman sitting in a suburban train, clad in snug skin-hugging tights. The photo was captioned “This is why you should never wear nude tights/leggings”. The woman was generously proportioned and the tights were naturally, strained to their fullest.
Like thousands of others, someone on one of my groups shared this photograph with the rest of us (dare I call us groupies?). The unknown woman obviously had no clue that someone had clicked her photo and circulated it. I responded with an “LOL” and, well, deleted the photo. I thought no more about it, till another friend commented that she had received this same photograph from no less than four different groups. “I pity that poor woman,” she said. “What did she do to deserve this?”
The stranger had gone “viral” for no fault of her own, except maybe a controversial dress sense.
That example might seem innocuous enough and — let’s be honest — we all ‘share’ and ‘like’ much more provocative photos/videos every single day. We all say and post stuff that ranges from the vicious to the utterly vacuous. And then we move on...
Let me give you another example. Last week, in a horrific accident, a young man was literally cut into two by a speeding truck. Instead of heeding his pleas for help, (he was trying to give people his family’s contact details), passers-by “took photos and videos” of the dying young man. Which means, if you google his name, you will chance upon graphic photos on some site or YouTube channel that shows a human life slowly ebbing away.
Just how and why have we managed to transform social media platforms into virtual forums filled with stuff that is most banal and brutal? Is it that we have become desensitised to human tragedy, to sorrow?
On the surface, not at all. We have never been this proactive in caring, sharing or ‘liking’ photos of starving children, dogs and other animals; posts dedicated to our moms, our dads, our sisters, our brothers; posts declaring our love of books, our love for India and her soldiers; inspirational stories; rags-to-riches tales; posts on things that cause cancer; foods to avoid, so on and so forth.
Most of this virtual information is basically pointless, because after we’ve read (okay, most times people DON’T read), ‘liked’, commented and shared, we move on. Which, when you think about it, is another example of how we consume a lot but digest little.
Worse, though, alongside this flows an equally deep river filled with invectives and insults. This virtual stream is filled with the choicest of abuse, the crassest of comments and, often, a deep, abiding anger. And just who is this virtual vitriol directed at? People in the public eye, people participating in protests, so on. For instance, a certain Rahul Gandhi — perhaps with his apparent vacuous-faced sincerity — is a popular figure of ridicule and scorn. But it is playwright/writer Girish Karnad’s turn too quite often. He is a “senile old fool” say the haters. Incidentally, that is a moniker he shares with Nobel Laureate and world-renowned economist, Dr. Amartya Sen.
That random men and women — “chamchas” or “bhakts”, depending on which side you are on — spend all their time hurling insults at some public figure or other, while singing hosannas to our peripatetic Prime Minister, is to be expected. They have nothing else to do and all the time to do it in. But when fellow journalists (some of whom call themselves “veterans”, mind you) join the gang, I, for one, wonder why. Then again, politics, like caste, brings out the worst in all of us. Add social media to the mix and otherwise-decent individuals are transformed into hate-spewing machines.
Is this plain old mob mentality at work? According to neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “a group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into 'mobs' that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality”. Obviously, the research refers to mobs on the street. But it can quite easily be used to describe mobs in virtual space also, don’t you think?
What astonishes me more is that such trolling (or trumpeting, depending on which side you are on), happens every day, every second. In fact. To get a clearer picture, take a look at >Internetlivestats if you don’t believe me. You will be blown away by the dizzying and astounding amount of useless information (photos, videos, blogs, posts, tweets), that we put out in virtual space, every second, every minute, every hour of every day.
And this leads me to another interesting observation — social media and smartphones continue to be an urban phenomenon, at least in India. And dating apps are exploding in our metros, to put it mildly. Evidently, the same people who spew such hate are also desperate to get laid. After all, frustration can screw you up. In more ways than one.
All this virulent social behaviour is curiously similar to the Hippie era. Where people procreated like rabbits on steroids, maintained strong human-communities and shared their thoughts most aggressively — the crucial difference is they all railed against the tyranny of the state; whereas today, we rail against one another.
Perhaps it's now time to try and make social media truly “social” again.
