Learning to stare up from a Four-Inch Screen

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.