Numb In The Age of Spin
“I’m out”. I feel a sense of relief as I gently toss my phone on the pillow. This is but a small moment in the day; probably a minute or so. But that moment makes me want to play the Lazy Song by Bruno Mars. Just for the line — “don’t feel like picking up my phone, so leave a message at the tone”. It’s a weird transition for someone who probably grew up in the age of social media.
Flashback to almost a decade ago. We’d just got our first computer at home. Enter the world of Orkut. Don’t blame me. In the illustrious words of Eminem, “I dreamed of being that cool kid even if it meant acting stupid”. Getting a testimonial on your profile was some achievement. Myspace account, Facebook profiles and so on; well you know the sequence. To a 14 year old, stating that you were 18 and old enough to be on Facebook was a daring thing to do. To know the most people, to stay relevant seemed to be “the shit”. Reaching the thousand friends mark on Facebook, followers on Twitter and so on seemed so cool till a while ago. No, this isn’t a rant about how these materialistic things keep you in a bubble. I’m not that high (yet).
I remember my status updates as a kid from time to time nowadays. Not voluntarily. Facebook makes it a point to remind me how I used to be. A 15 year old who on some day posted, “Ma lyf, Ma rulezzz, Dont like it, Dont need you”. Ha! Stupidity ran deep in the supposed cool kid validation that I’d concocted in my head. But I’m proud of myself, I have enough content to laugh about how I used to think. Sometimes I come across content that I’ve posted or messages that I’ve sent and realize the flaws and the lessons to learn from them. Things have changed though. I’ve changed and so have the times. There’s more emphasis on political correctness and calling out inappropriate behavior. And society’s a better place for it to an extent.
The current socio-political atmosphere has made it worse though. Everything is a “left vs right” debate for some. One day we laugh at TikTok videos and the next day the government bans the same application that gave a platform to people from the rural parts of the country to express themselves. One day, people don’t trust a vaccine developed when one government is in power, and the next day another party comes into power and the vaccine is now good to the same people.
I’m not picking sides here, you see. I just don’t care which side of the fence ones on, or even if there’s a fence. From times when things were black and white (no, not the race if that’s where you think I’m going), we’re greying up more by the day. The internet has only gone on to accelerate the process — “Expressing oneself”, “acceptance and inclusion”, “everybody’s beautiful” (no, I got a mirror at home, thanks!) and so on. What started as a stream has become a turbulent flow now. There’s too much information thrown at you, and better pay keen attention for any of it to make sense. Navigating social media as a regular user feels like wading through a trippy Rick and Morty scene with multiple portals. Let’s assume that you are publicly wondering on social media if an athlete recovered faster than another from an Achilles injury. As you walk down that thought, you suddenly fall into a portal, “Oh that’s racist, you say black people are built better than white people”. Before one can answer, you fall into another portal, linking old stereotypes to the wonderment. And before you explore that, you’re suddenly rated and branded by some, well if they read your posts (old ones too) somewhere. The peer influence is real though, now it’s inevitable there’s at least one person who spots these things in your social media circle, and take it to a different tangent without understanding context.
World news is within a tap on the screen, which includes both the professional and self-proclaimed coverage. It is getting almost impossible to get to speed with daily news these days.
“My point is, for a guy your age, you wouldn’t even know the pain, because in your generation, it’s like the space shuttle blows up every fucking day. How can you care about anything when you know every goddamn thing? I’m getting over one cop shooting, and then another one happens, and then another one happens, and another one happens. I’m crying about Paris, and then Brussels happens. I can’t keep track of all this shit. So you just give the fuck up. That’s the hallmark of your generation, and that’s fucked up, because your generation lives in the most difficult time in human history. This is the age of spin. The age where nobody knows what the fuck they’re even looking at. Did you know that Planned Parenthood was for abortions? It’s for people that don’t plan things out at all. That’s right. So, a guy your age doesn’t really know how he feels. Are you pro-choice? Are you anti-consequences? What does it all really mean? It’s easier not to care for you. But for us, we were trained to care. We were raised that way.” — Dave Chappelle: The Age of Spin
Nobody could’ve said it better. It depends on the person on how they react, but either you’re outraging every other day over something or you’ve gone numb from it all. Unless you’re watching videos of animal rescues and soldiers reuniting with their families. It’s funny to see a part of this social media world, living in one of the greyest societies ever but trying to look at things as black and white, skipping over the grey-scale as if it were a jump-rope. The toxicity of calling out content without a healthy debate and judging without context has only grown exponentially over the past decade.
Well I’m glad I made my little mistakes, had conversations and learnt before the toxicity settled in. Kids growing these days need to learn it in a harder way maybe. Or they’re probably ditching the media and making their mistakes in the real world, where it isn’t always documented, and even if it is, doesn’t pop up every year like an anniversary message. Sometimes I think of posting something these days, and refrain for the fear of being mistaken.
I was a soft kid, I was sensitive. I cry easy and I would be scared to fistfight and my mother used to tell me this thing, I don’t even know if you remember but you said this to me more than once. You said, “Son, sometimes you have to be a lion so you can be the lamb you really are.” I talked this shit like a lion. I’m not afraid of any of you when it comes word to word, I will gab with the best of them just so I can chill and be me. — Dave Chappelle, Mark Twain Prize Acceptance Speech.
If it suits you, talk your shit like a lion like Dave does. Me? I’m typing “I’m off” and throwing my phone away for the day!
