Take me back to simpler times

Learning to deal with the epidemic of information

Every generation has a definition of simpler times. But the rate at which the world has changed for a millennial like me, it is hard to pick which time-period I consider acceptably simple. Now, I appreciate the ability to see loved ones in any part of the world for free with a touch on a screen. I also like the fact that I can carry all my books on a single device. So, I prefer not to go too far back. Just a decade should suffice.

Facebook of 2010 was a platform to find long lost friends and show them how awesome your life is. In that life on Facebook, we partied every Saturday, travel every so often and took pictures glamorous enough to be on a hoarding. For reasons unknown, some people also shared borrowed philosophy as part of their daily lives. That “What’s on your mind?” was an opportunity to show the world that our mind is capable of only great things.

Twitter in 2010 was still serving noble causes. Astronaut T.J.Creamer posted the first off-Earth message from International Space Station on Jan 22, 2010 and furthered the outreach goals of NASA. Ardent soccer fans connected with their tribe all over the world during FIFA 2010.

Smart phones were neither as prevalent nor smart enough to pro-actively predict your next random thought. Blackberry was an executive accessory and I-Phone still a luxury.

Google existed with its enormous data centers even then. But our searches were limited by relevance. 24X7 news channels were watched for entertainment or debates, but written words were still deemed sacred. Newspapers and books were the trusted source of information and verified modes of improving awareness. Google and Wikipedia were mostly used to supplement that selected information from newspapers.

But within 10 years this “Information Age” has become the age of mental health crises. Let us take an example of the news I came across last week

• A global bulletin of my subscribed news channel on YouTube published a video about the oil spill at Maldives. On August 8, Maldives declared national emergency when a Japanese cargo ship ran aground its coast and spilled around 4000 tons of oil. Not only did this resulted in an ecological disaster killing the coral reeves, fish, and all other marine life, it is soon going to translate into an economic disaster as marine tourism is the primary source of employment in Maldives.
• I was using Google on my phone to search something work related when the cards showed me the news about two Canadian Arctic ice caps having completely disappeared recently, long before the predicted timeline. I opened the link to read about it and there I learnt that Greenland’s ice sheet also lost a record 530 billion metric tons of ice last year.
• As part of the daily routine, I logged into Facebook and came across the videos of the Beirut Blast recorded on August 4. I had read the details in the news but at some point, I was bound to come across one of the many videos of the blast captured live. It left me shuddered but obviously I did not stop there. I had to find out what caused it and that resulted in many more videos of bandaged victims expressing the disappointment in their government against the backdrop of blood-stained walls.
• My best friend from Bay area forwarded me a WhatsApp message about emergency evacuation she received from the city officials. State of California declared an emergency due to 560 unusual blazes of forest fires.

Obviously, I was perturbed even when I did not really go out looking for most of this information. Granted these are all big news and would have made it in newspaper of 2010 as well. But would a few sentences and an image in the newspaper cause the kind of impact that was caused when I saw a live video of the blast and those blood stains in the affected homes? Would it made me collectively feel like an endangered species, the way that ice-cap article with many distressed comments made me feel? Would it have become personal, the way it did when my best friend sent the evacuation message, she received?

Something our earlier generations would have acknowledged as a tragedy somewhere and moved on, has developed a tendency to become a personal tragedy for us. It is not only the enormous quantity of news that is causing this but also the packaging of it. Distributing news is not the prerogative of select few media houses now. With a smart phone in every hand, every person is a source of news to the world today. Information received from this user generated content, popularly abbreviated as UGC, is more personalized and relatable and therefore more provoking. When a man infected with Covid19 in India, broadcasts the video on twitter about not getting proper medical assistance and die the very next day, the pain we feel is a lot more than what we feel when we see the COVID death rate graphs at briefings of Governor Cuomo. It is this humanization of news that is taking the toll on our mind. After all, we have evolved as a social animal and a social being cares.

It is this humanization of news that is taking the toll on our mental health.

But how much can one care? Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens that the circle of concern for a human brain is limited to at most 150 people. In times where that circle has extended to 7 billion people, we need a simpler and economic way to express that concern. Enters Microblogging.

The one-liners we fire on social media platforms renders an illusion that we have done our part for the community. The asynchronous and if needed, anonymous nature of this method also helps us evade accountability. The enormity of a billion distressed posts, tweets and comments has grave consequences. Today it is resulting into withdrawal of products by companies, cancellation of shows of budding artists and resignation of people in offices without verifying the authenticity and accuracy of that news and without understanding the long-term social and economic implications of such impulsive actions. Not only does it lead to further alienation, harassment, injustice, and anarchy, it is also causing us to live in a constant state of anxiety wondering if this is the end of the world.

Is 2020 really the end of the world? Is it really the worst of times? I bet Charles Dickens would disagree.

Let us talk about the last pandemic in 1918 that took place right after 40 million lives were lost in World War I. The world was still reeling under the aftermath of the first ever global war when 50 million more had to give up their lives to the consequence of it, the Spanish Flu. America was not yet the welfare state it is today and there were no Congress sessions on unemployment benefits for people who lost their jobs then. In 1917, Lenin commenced the most crucial revolution in the history of Russia. The civil war that ensued in 1918 resulted into 7–12 million casualties. The Great Train Wreck of Nashville, considered the greatest train wreck ever, happened in 1918 when two passenger trains, collided head-on, costing at least 101 lives and injuring an additional 171. Earthquakes and tornadoes were still striking the world and if we are talking about ecological disasters, the largest mass stranding of whales happened on Chatham Islands in New Zealand which became a graveyard of about 1000 whales.

The recent Democratic National Convention have tried extremely hard to convince us that its the worst of the times because of Donald Trump. But the very fact that they can openly criticize him is enough to prove the contrary. Remind yourself of the autocratic rule of Stalin in nuclear armed Russia. Even the ancient world survived the Roman rule of drama-queen Nero and problem child Commodus.

History is full of such periods of calamity where the different parts of the world was in chaos. The only difference was that a single human being was not carrying the weight of the entire world on his shoulders but dealing only with the issues that affected him directly. Imagine dealing with the Civil War in America in 1860s when the news comes from India about British crushing their First war of Independence. Which one would have you tweeted about then?

Technological change is an irreversible process. Therefore, when I say I want to go back to simpler times, it does not mean “cancelling” the social media or smart devices. It means evolving with the technology. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world did not go on a bombing spree; nor did it shun the nuclear technology altogether. While nuclear arsenals were piled up for defense, nuclear technology was put to a better use in fulfilling the growing energy demands of the industrial world.

It means evolving with the technology

Similarly, after experiencing the detrimental political effects of excess social media communication, we need to acknowledge it as a serious problem and refrain from reacting on every piece of news we get. Ability to limit the incoming information is not happening anytime soon. New privacy laws and sophisticated security features will be needed to ensure citizen’s interests, opinions and insecurities are not exploited by political and business organizations for their vested interests. But by the time that happens, we must undertake this initiative and not let ourselves get exploited.

We need to prioritize the issues and raise our voice in matters we hold dear and where we can make an actual impact.

By being an upright citizen, paying taxes fair and square and not resorting to illegal means, we are already playing our part in the community. Billions of social media comments and cancel culture, will not bring about justice in the society; fairness and humanity in our conduct will.