The Tyranny of Now: The Enemy of the Day
Five back to back exams later, my roommate and I were as ready as we could be to “turn-up”. Regardless of temperatures nearing minus 21 degrees, we found ourselves dressed in bare shoulder tops, chokers and six inch heels, ready to take on the nightlife of Toronto. Our plan was to go to the most elaborate club downtown, however, we ended up at our usual Thursday night gig, Gracie’s.
Now one would only assume that if you are at a bar waiting to get in for thirty five minutes, at 1AM, you would at least be engaged in dancing or having drunken conversations with your friends. Oddly enough, that was not me. Instead, I found myself on my phone, in the midst of a crowd of university students liberated from exams, dancing intoxicatedly to live music, with girls forming chain links to prevent themselves from being lost in an overheated crowd. I was so absorbed on my phone, mindlessly refreshing my unchanging Instagram feed hoping not to miss anyone’s latest picture, looking through tweets I had read thrice, and completely tuning out my surroundings. I was absorbed in this realm of passive consumption, with no thought of what might happen next.
And then it hit me, actually, he hit me. I found myself swept from under my feet, and found myself flat on my face, on a floor filled with salt water puddles and broken shards of beer bottles. Only to see that the bouncer accidentally fell onto the floor, taking me down with him. The first thought that came to my mind, as I was lying on the floor in confusion was, where is my phone?
Perhaps I could have avoided all of this if I got off of my phone, popped myself out of my social media bubble and my obsession with being instantly gratified about knowing current events. As this was the route cause of my passive consumption and my inability to think ahead of the current situation.
This mishap got me thinking, are we all so focused on the now, or in passively consuming social media that we are no longer are critically thinking of what may happen to our future? Is our yearning for instant gratification and instant response, preventing us from thinking about the underlying problems and what may happen next? Do we all need our ‘bubbles’ popped or need to experience a fall to open our eyes and to think critically of our future?
The answer is yes, maybe not a bruise inducing fall but we definitely need to be more critical and analytical of the current events that are taking place in our world today. We must not react so instantly like we find ourselves doing on social media, instead we must think critically and act accordingly.
Social media gives us the luxury of being immediately gratified, and it also enables us to react to what we see at immeasurable speeds. Simply by logging on to our Twitter feeds, we can search any current event that is happening around the world, and we can easily share our thoughts regarding any situation.
I find that many of us are often so used to being instantaneously updated about current events, via social media, that we often rashly react without taking a step back to think. This rash reaction often results from our attempt to keep up with online mediums that are constantly updated every hour, minute and millisecond of the day. We find ourselves mindlessly reading and never thinking about the route cause of a problem. Our rash reactions and the lack of critical thinking prevents us from actively making necessary changes to route problems, thus resulting in us addressing surface level situations.
This issue is excellently exemplified in Obama’s interview with Vice. Specifically, when Obama touched upon the topic of ISIS, as well as the lack of activism within citizens across the nation. Obama mentioned how citizens that are unhappy with the unfoldings of the political power heads tend to take it upon social media by, “staying at home and being cynical”, as opposed to actively voting against those in power (Obama Talks to Vice, Vice). This illustrates how individuals are stuck in their online social media ‘bubbles’ complaining about current events, yet not actively changing anything about it. This becomes a cyclical cycle, where individuals tend to complain, not vote and as a result maintain their current situations. This goes to show that many individuals are not thinking critically of what they are actually accomplishing. For instance, passively consuming information and assuming that writing a rash 140 character tweet will make a difference, is not necessarily the most effective way to make a change.
He further begins to mention how as a political leader and as a citizen it is mandatory to consider long term improvements, as opposed to finding quick fix solutions to issues that will only reemerge if their route cause is not determined and solved. For instance, many individuals are so focused on the current reason of why ISIS arose, and how to fight back immediately. However, they are not considering the underlying issue of why the latest tyrants have risen and thinking of how to prevent another generation of them from following into their footsteps. Obama says that the underlying issue is that young generations within countries at war do not have an education, no prospects for the future and face a lack of validation, thus they take it upon themselves to become ‘fighters’ to attain a label of self-identity (Obama Talks to Vice, Vice). Therefore, even though the immediate solution to terrorism may be to instantly fight back, it goes to show that if the underlying problem is not addressed, the pattern of terrorism would repeat itself. Instead, the solution would be it to invest in the generations of upcoming children, their education, diplomacy and esteem in order to prevent them from becoming fighters for the wrong reasons.
This illustrates that in order to truly assess any problem or situation and solve it, one must step back and analytically view the route cause, as opposed to rashly thinking for short-term solutions.
Social media places us in the ‘now’ more than ever, as we are constantly being updated about what is happening every minute around the world. Social media makes it easy to immediately react just as it makes it easy to immediately receive information. We are so used to quickly receiving what we want and quickly responding, that we have almost forgotten to take a step back and to deeply think. Thus resulting in us finding ineffective short term solutions to long term problems.
Now this poses the question of how can social media user’s escape the “tyranny of now”? Now the first thing that may come to mind is to get off of social media, as I should have at Gracie’s. However, I do not think that this is necessarily the best solution because at the end of the day social media is a tool, and it depends on how we use it, and how we perceive the information that is upon it. Instead it may be more beneficial to take a step back from what we read and deeply think about how our reactions would benefit a problem in the long run. We should question why the situations we read about are occurring, and how we can prevent these problems from happening in the first place.
Now back to Gracie’s, perhaps the enemy of that day was the bouncer, or maybe it was myself.
Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
