Modern human beings live in the cyberspace, getting all the stimulation
to get on with our lives, both desired and unwarranted, the needed and the
unwanted, from the electronically led-up screens all around us. Disseminating information to a broad audience
no longer involved physically traveling to distant corners, seeking out
like-minded individuals to preach novel ideologies, hoping that the few minutes
of attention span may completely reorient a person’s dispositions on a certain
topic.
Now the job is made much easier: just find the right
platform online, put on the relevant information, and marketed across the
globe. Once the idea catches on, the
plethora of social networking, of access portals, of active netizens, will
automatically expand the geographic coverage of that idea through unintended
viral campaigns. The idea can each
audiences hundreds of time more than any physical reaching or advertising can
ever possibly reach in an span of time.
Yet, as online technologies take over our world and become
centerpiece of our lives, sometimes people tend to forget that it is, at the
end, just tool, a simulation of physical reality into a virtual
interconnectedness. The events, the
ideas, and the individuals spread through the web are still based on the real
world, generated by humans with sweat, blood, and thumping brainpower. Without the real world, the virtual one is
nothing but a mess of bandwidths, servers, and cables – infrastructures intend
to connect but with no content.
The recent carnage in Egypt
serves as a prime example of how the virtual world was both an effective and
ineffective tool for dissemination.
Surely the whole world saw, within perhaps minutes, the blasts of tear
gas, the march of armored vehicles, and bloods of protesters. The world expressed their anger, and many are
heard. But somehow, the prevalence of
that anger felt cold, inhumane, and distant behind those electronic
screens. In a contradictory manner, our
collective anger becomes rather belittled in cyberspace.
It seems that the inundation of information that comes with
further development of these information-filled screens made the weight of each
segment of information relatively less in our eyes. After all, as humans, we have limited time
and capability for absorbing and attending.
Technology did not dissipate those limitations, but instead tested their
true limits and stretched them to the brink.
We had to keep up with the mounting information, so each piece, no
matter how emotional or anger-filled, has to be taken in quickly.
The only way we can escape our collective devolution to a
state of numbness, filled with information yet devoid of emotions, is to step
away from those little screens that are gradually taking control of our
lives. To learn to look away from our
laptops, smart-phones, and even colorful advertising boards on the street
sides. To understand the magnitude of a
piece of information, we have to walk into its center of origin, a place where
all its gory details and suppressed emotions come alive.
Unfortunately, it seems that too many of us forgot how to do
just that. Expressing anger on a social
network or a blog post is cost-free, pain-free, and hassle-free. Anyone can read, write, and add-on without
putting oneself in physical danger. But
unfortunately, being stuck in cyberspace and just reading off what’s in the
inter-webs, our comments also become feelings-free and even independent-thoughts-free. We just feed off millions of other pieces of
information out there on the exact same topic and regurgitate.
We become not individuals but just another drop in the ocean
of group-think, unintentionally created by eating up the endless mountains of
information, with all their inherent and unavoidable biases we find online. So perhaps its time that we all learn to
stare up from our four-inch screens and live a little in the real world, seeing
societies and events as they are and judging them ourselves, through our own
lenses rather than in the eyes of others who dutifully reported them online.
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