Is our virtual world making us all zombies?

As I complete three years of my fortnightly tryst with this newspaper, I  would like to focus on something completely apolitical. Let us discuss certain universal trends and what they tell us about the world that we live in. The first trend is the ubiquitous earphone or headphone. In any city or village, both in India and abroad, you see both young and old thrust earphones deep into their ears as they go about their daily lives.

Some of these contraptions are wired and others wireless, but the one thing that is common to these gizmos is the bubble in which their wearers live. In public spaces, metros, trams, airport lounges you have an entire bunch of people who are like zombies, either talking into those little microphones embedded into the wire of their earphones or laughing to themselves over a joke or an anecdote that resonates deep only in their ears.

No longer is there even a pretence of attempting to make polite conversation with the person next to you, and if you try to initiate small talk with someone who has these not-so-tiny buds sticking out of their ears you are sure to be rewarded with a very exasperated and angry glare, which conveys in no uncertain terms the sentiment — buzz off, and mind your own business!

Now at one level, this may just be the right antidote for not interacting with strangers who you may never come across again in your entire life, but on an entirely different plane, it robs you of that “chance conversation” that can both be meaningful and enlightening, if not life-changing. What this bubble is doing is that it is stunting natural growth by enabling people to become absorbed in a virtual world that they create for themselves. It is like a gargantuan video game that each person plays with their own selves, as they sleepwalk through life.  

The skill of interacting with strangers, hearing their life stories, sharing their joys and disappointments and being a part of the larger community of human beings is all but completely vanishing, as whole generations now believe that this insularity is the “new normal”.

Coupled with this is the trend of customisation. We now have the ability to customise what we read, see and even do. This creates a vast echo chamber where we see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear and read what we want to read. While on the surface this may seem perfectly normal and the ultimate panacea of choice on another paradigm, it cuts out the alternative point of view, or the counternarrative.

There was a time when a newspaper gave you a cross-section of everything. Even if you did not want to read, let us say, the lifestyle section it was still there and as you flipped through a newspaper something may possibly catch your eye and make you linger long enough to get you interested in something that wasn’t your usual beaten track. Even with television, though you had the ability to flip channels, you were not watching something that was always customised to your preferences.

However, now you have an entire generation that gets its information from their very own plate, be it the mobile screen, laptop screen or the “smart” TV. It is like a made-to-order menu where your international news comes from a global broadcasting service, your domestic news from a particular newspaper, your sports feed from a specific sports website and your weather update from a specialised weather forecasting service. All this would keep tumbling on your Facebook homepage or any other home screen that you choose to create on your favourite electronic plate.

Coupled with that is the people you follow on Twitter or whom you choose to like on Facebook. Invariably you do not follow or track those whom you do not like except if you are a troll, bhakt or a pervert. What this does is that it creates information skew for only that penetrates into your “bubble” what you have permitted to enter.  

I once had an amazing conversation with a brilliant young student of creative arts at a café in Washington D.C. He knew all the masters of painting, including the finer nuances of their works, and listening to him talk was like a tutorial on the history of painting, sculpture and other forms of creativity.

However, he did not know that there was a war raging in Syria or for that matter what the ISIS stood for. He vaguely knew that there were some bad guys “Islamists”, as he had heard, who were killing people by driving big trucks into milling crowds. Beyond that he was not interested, for he thought that this was not a part of the “beautiful echo chamber” that he had created around himself, and he just did not want to allow reality to intrude into his blissful and blessed existence.  

However, it is extremely dangerous to grow up in a world where you customise your own reality by shutting everything else out. As the penetration of mobile phones, social media and other such technologies grows, this “echo chamber” would become all-pervasive and produce an entire generation of people who are intimately connected with themselves but disconnected with the reality around them.

They are always in a state of idyllic transcendental meditation. This could be good, but imagine an 11-year boy addicted to watching pornography on his mobile phone either because his parents do not have the time to observe what he does online, or they are sensitive about his privacy.  Forget men and women, even kids do not share passwords of their phones and other such stuff with their parents.

While the march of technology is fantastic and you can hook up to a wifi network in a shopping mall and make a WhatsApp or a signal call to someone thousands of miles away absolutely free of cost, the flip side of all this technology is creating walking, talking automatons whose comfort levels in their own surreal world may end up becoming an anathema to human civilisation as we have known it.