Almost a week ago, a friend called me and asked me to meet at a quaint cafe to just ‘chill’ and have a good time. This was unprecedented as this particular friend, is not very fond of meeting people. We talked about meaningless shit, but mostly clicked lots of photographs in different poses and went our ways. It turns out, this absolute pea-brained social zombie of a friend wanted to update her Instagram feed and upload a picture. And there it was, a vacuous meet sliced and diced and splashed with vibrant colours, captioned with an unrelated dense quote, custom made for little heart reacts and comments but more importantly- driving the need for an incessant validation, an acute desire to belong and be perceived as more cooler, neater, saleable version of ourselves.
Now, this is not going to be yet another alarming rant about how ‘bad’ social media or by extension, the internet is. This is a tirade of questioning how fast we are changing the perception of our identities and integrating, calibrating it into smart algorithms. We are, in effect, selling ourselves. Constantly uploading the most trivial stuff on the internet, continuously placing more importance on documenting an experience than the experience itself. We are bombarded with news, updates, intimate moments from people’s stupendous lives, making us question our own. This Instagram generation, however naïve, outspoken, vain, is, perhaps, more conscious of how we are perceived – by friends, family, colleges, jobs, hell, even by people we’ve never met than any other generation, ever!
Social media is hideously contributing to something called identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do – even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear, or the airline we fly, reflects on us. It follows how we want to feel about ourselves and is often nothing more than how we want to be perceived externally. The social media market, where we live now, demands a focus on visible characteristics and in a society that values image over content, visual perception over substance, it is eerily appropriate then, this vortex of augmented, edited realities that have become central to our being, our existence. It has become so deeply embedded in the way we speak, how we express, how we live. In this age of continuously spamming each other with bite-sized commentary, blindly transmitting the latest fad, endless voyeuristic scrolling of a stranger’s lives; an overload of social media and hyper-consumerism, it isn’t surprising then, that this has resulted in a crop of disenfranchised individuals lashing about the ‘detox of social media’, if there is such a thing as detox.
This is stemming from far deeper characteristics of this age. The internet is enabling a different phenomenon. Manipulation in the form of advertising, paranoia in the form of propaganda, detached bubbles in the form of social networks, commodification and branding of every sphere of life; it has become the fodder to be consumed by masses. It has surpassed the beneficiary phase of itself and gone far beyond that.
Some experts call this doomed obsession with capturing every tiny moment of our life (which is, perhaps, metastasising into perilous surveillance), a form of escapism. Even if we look before the era of the burst of technology, what does an average human being does most of the time in an average lifespan? Looking out the window staring at life? Working majority of their lifetime? What we are really escaping from, is the utter boredom of life, such vast expanse of life. Because of the physical reality, for the majority is mundane and repetitive and boring. We’ll perpetuate this cycle of caked up reality until it is augmented, packaged, pumped through thousand colourful filters, further escaping into the tiny black screens, until what remains is meaninglessly wrecked up emptiness. As detective Rust says, “It’s going become a ghetto; a giant gutter in outer space”.
After all, some of the brightest mind in the world are working long hours to capitalise on our distraction, to squeeze out our ephemeral attention even more efficiently. Really, what chance do we stand?
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