The social media blinkers

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

My growing-up exposure was to the world of telegrams, booked telephone calls, mediated through an operator, and greenish-blue inland letters as modes of communication.

The postman’s arrival was the most anticipated moment of the day. I constantly peered from my window, waiting for him, as a delayed love letter or a bad report card from school could create havoc.

The arrival of computer changed one’s entire understanding of time and speed. How, at the click of a button, a mail written in Chandigarh could reach London in the same instant. It seemed not only a miracle but a source of wonderment and awe. The computer quickly became the new-age god.

The journey from the telegram era to the computer took many decades but I remained a technological refugee — unsure of its basic usage, constantly floundering.

What is disconcerting in this technological ‘Pandora’s box’ is the way information is disbursed, like lightning, with deadly force. Thoughtfulness, homework, due diligence sometimes get brushed aside in this immediate and reactive space. This space sometimes becomes contentious where invectives are spewed and media trials take place. The words that are churned out can be a source of unexpected troubles, or alternately can help in articulating lost spaces, awaiting to be reclaimed and articulated in a language that sometimes gets buried in hyperbole and rhetoric. Words are never ‘only words,’ says Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek; they matter because they define the contours ‘of what we can do’.

I see most social media spaces as a space where one has a voice to articulate a multitude of singularities. It all adds up and strengthens free thought and expression despite the fact that words do not always have fixed meaning and can lend themselves to multiple interpretations. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large I contain multitudes,” says American poet Walt Whitman.

Social media is a performance space. It allows you to be whoever you wish to be. I see profiles of writers and actors claiming international renown and strangers becoming confidants and personal therapists. This made me understand that social media is also a space to invent, imagine, fantasise, fetishise and have multiple identities. This identity, constructed through the imagination, makes the ordinary extraordinary, creating a hallucinatory world where truths are tested and discarded and then tested again and again.

We are now inundated with instantly available information, and we all have become addicts to this accessibility. The question that concerns is the difference between apprehension and comprehension, between information that is received and the information that is processed and should ostensibly transform us. Transformation that requires effort and imagination has somewhat got dissipated due to social media and its accomplice — information at the press of a button.

We have sterilised and sanitised our world, and like Lady Macbeth, we are constantly washing not only our hands but also our reality. Surrounded by social media — WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Clubhouse, Instagram — a digital reality within the confines of the computer replaces real life, real experiences, real relationships. Through this medium, we enter an etherised, safe, cocooned world with no tangible connection, no smell, no touch, no feel. A virtual, alternative reality with no sunlight or air!

Social media is under the scanner, and the cacophonous arguments for a ban are certainly an assault on free expression and choices. Most social media chatter hovers between fact and factoid. Hate speeches, stalking, trolling is now a cottage industry and no one emerges smelling of roses. Conversely, social media is also a space that is associated with heat and passion, conflict/confrontation and defiance. An interplay of opposing forces and actions, in which beliefs, moral choices and political proclivities are in evidence. Isn’t that what democracy is all about? Plurality, multiplicity, many voices, many threads, many layers of opinion? Why silence it? Dissent is considered a threat in autocracy, not in a democracy!

The irony is that social media is used for different reasons by different people. Sometimes to plug an opinion, sell a product, share an idea or a poem! More significant than the facts of life is the meaning and significance that we attribute to those fact-formulating ideas and opinions, creating perceptions and perspectives.

Social media also caters to the exhibitionist within us, and can also make us believe in the ‘Dear Diary’ syndrome. The isolation of being with your phone, iPad or computer makes one temporarily forget that social media is a public space. Conversely, the fear of being invisiblised due to Covid-19 has made us desperate to be noticed, acknowledged and validated through our endless posts, with the number of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ determining our existence. I exist only because of social media is a scary dictum, but a truism for all addicts. Most social media addicts are nocturnal ramblers, interacting with disembodied souls, unknown to each other. They spew, rant, share intimacies, secrets, thoughts, fetishes and a response from this faceless multitude becomes the barometer from which one’s popularity and visibility is mapped.

It’s a double-edged sword, which plays different roles for different strokes. It satisfies a voyeuristic streak within us. A new dress, haircut, outing to a fancy eatery has no purpose unless it is photographed and shared. Each phone has become a personal museum of pictures and events. If this museum of photography is not acknowledged, our digital edifice crumbles and disintegrates. It never ceases to amaze me how fragile, transient and vulnerable we are!

The social media world is certainly polarised by those who are active and those who have rejected it. An isolating and lonely space, filled with unexpected ripples. We do not realise that our tiniest gesture can have a large-scale impact. A comment that does not fit into the national narrative can lead to jail, public censure or court cases. As a child, we often recited this ditty, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” But today, it’s all reversed, the sticks and stones that break the bones of a hapless vegetable seller or violate the body of a woman have the perpetuator escaping unscathed, while the words and ideas of a thinker, a protester, an artist or a cartoonist can land him/her in jail or make him/her face the lynch mob.

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