(Just imagine me in an Oxford classroom, gesturing to a room filled with smartly dressed intellectuals. Then you may grasp the pretentiousness.)
I believe we have lost our sensitivity to issues outside of our everyday life. Even when seemly local issues are discussed on social platforms, apathy and cruelty dominate the dialogue.
Over saturation is one possible cause of this systemic lack of connection to public problems. Anonymity and comfort are two accessories. As is numerously highlighted by people smarter than me, the glass you view your Facebook feed through is a shield. It protects you from the realizations that language matters. Language shapes the lens with which we see the world. It is a cultural force of nature and its tides have slowly been growing more aggressive throughout this and the previous decade.
Our technological revolution has unburdened us with the hardship of dealing with one another. Whether it's purchasing a ticket for a flight, checking out of a supermarket or calling to get out of jury duty we are met automation. We touch more screens on any given day than human hands. There is a social pandemic of reclusion and it distorts how much we truly need each other. We've lost our taste for fresh fruit and now pretend to prefer canned peaches because its easy.
My only hope is that together we can realize the magic at our fingertips can link us closer together if we only choose and commit to trusting one another. Its a hard choice to make when the very magic lies to us about the freightening creatures outside your door. This wedge between us must be reshaped or shattered or bypassed completely if we are ever to once again shift our culture towards empathy.
td;dr
ReplyDeletebut for reals...this at least semi-connects with a gamut of shit I've been thinking about recently, that I could blog about for days. But one problem that happens with internet interaction is multi-pronged, but one part of the prong is that while yes, the internet is kind of an anonymous, shielded version of reality, that doesn't, to me, make it a more "free" place of expression and ideas. It obviously can be, but it takes a certain courage. Because the shield and anonymity plays into the hands of the haters, and human history has kinda shown that violence and hatred come out on top, i.e. Europeans vs American natives, and vs African natives, who didnt have guns and giant organized militaries so were reduced to the background of importance. So because it's detached from reality and human compassion, the haters come out in full vigor, and you don't want them to attack you so you stay in line. Which leads to the bigger prong of the problem, or maybe the big fat handle that all the prongs lead into, which is explained very eloquently in Glenn Greenwald's TED Talk, which is that under any semblance of being watched, most people will choose their actions in a way to not offend or "be weird" in the face of that person watching, maybe out of fear of being judged or maybe for some other reason. So if you picture a bubble of possible actions, that bubble shrinks, which eventually leads to conformity and forgetting the variety and magic that a human life can both contain and give to the world in a very real way. But it all needs to start with complete empathy, and also some people waking the fuck up and not being dumb or assholish. I could go on for days but I gotta pee and sleep so goodnight everybody.
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