The primary necessities of humankind are food, water, clothes
and shelter or so we thought, until we accessed the digital ether. Now food and
water can take a back seat, but our smart-phones can’t. I will not be entirely
wrong if I say that we cannot survive ten minutes without checking for
notifications on our phone these days. If you can, then you are either my dad’s
age or have reached a higher spiritual plane.
It is true that digitization has taken the world to a
different pedestal, simplifying how we approach our daily tasks in a far more
efficient and time effective manner and improved the quality of life in
general. With the miniaturization of digital platforms and applications,
everything that we need is available on our fingertips, in other words the
smartphone. Our phones can do much more than make or receive calls these days.
In fact now-a-days they are used for everything other than making calls.
I still remember the first time Whatsapp was launched. Everybody
was intrigued with the emoticons or emojis as you may call them. They were so
exhaustive that all emotions humanly possible were covered therein. After a
week of using Whatsapp I happened to realise with quite a bit of alarm that I
had not spoken to my family, who stay in another city for almost a week. It was
only a matter of time before greetings were sent by Whatsapp, school homework
was submitted by google apps and party invites were posted on Google maps.
Then there was the dawn of the “all knowledgeable
multi-faceted personality”. An engineer gives lectures on the country’s monetary
policy and the nuances of capital market dealings. An accountant becomes an
expert in rocket trajectories and gravity-turns as does an athlete on political
strategy and foreign policies. It is good if everyone has an opinion on some
things, but not so much when everyone has an opinion on everything. If someone doesn’t
post their opinion on their Facebook page or Twitter handle on any event of the
day, they are considered uninformed and lagging behind. It has become a slugfest to display one’s expertise about events on social media, how much ever
trivial they are and thus resulting in a satiation of egos as opposed to any
fruitful accomplishment.
This feat would have been next to impossible or highly
utopian until 04th of September 1998, on which day two gentlemen in
Menlo Park, California founded Google. It is the ultimate go to tool for any
kind of information so much so that the in India they are referring to Google
as Google Matha (read: mother) and sister of Goddess Saraswati, the Goddess of
knowledge.
The topic of satiation of egos brings me to the umpteen
social media apps which we all access on a daily basis. All fantastic apps, I
must say, which help us keep in touch with friends even way back from school,
to portray achievements, share ideas, art and culture, to promote businesses
etc. However, it also develops a kind of “have to post” mania. We can’t seem to
travel anywhere these days or have a good meal without posting the fact on
social media. We always argue that this is just for the benefit of those people
who couldn’t join in but would secretly admit that these posts also give us a
weird sense of accomplishment and an ego boost. The irony though is the fact
that whenever we join any of these social media apps, the first thing we do is
to go to the security settings and up the security on all parameters.
In short, we are eternally addicted to social media
applications which were invented by their respective founders so that people
who don’t know each other can come into contact with each other; but however complain
and express surprise when a stranger does exactly that and approaches us on said ‘social’ media. We
post everything about our lives on social media including what we had for
breakfast and how hard our stool was that morning, but
make sure that these posts are seen only by close family or a list of selected
friends. We wish the family a good morning on Whatsapp rather than walk up to
the living room where we can do that in person.
Therefore, in summation we are a generation of the un-social
social! We are also a generation of a special kind of stupid!
