The Social Farce

I cringe at what I intend to hint to with the blog title as I type it. The world around me is being con­sumed by this “social media” virus and I stand here in it, but not of it; I stand between shift­ing par­a­digms in a knock-​off world — a mere men­tal state of per­cep­tive real­ity shaped by our sub­con­scious lust of belong­ing to this cog­ni­tive group yet be unique in the hun­dreds of thou­sands around us.

My direc­tor asked me a few weeks ago: “What do you think is the future of social media?”. I replied with silence; I did not know what the future of social media is, because I believe it is built around a psy­che that is adept at being delu­sional yet can be bro­ken by an odd indi­vid­ual. I believe that that we are ush­ered into an era where we believe that we are empow­ered. We believe we have power because we now believe our voices are heard. We believe we can change our world because the rest of the world is now watch­ing. Com­mon folk like you and I and a horde of other peo­ple. Our ideas are becom­ing a by-​product of the cor­ner of the mas­sive pool we hap­pen to swim in. And, indeed, we have seen count­less exam­ples of this “empowerment”.

But we never stop to ask why we have been empow­ered, and where is this en masse cog­ni­tive process going — and who is dri­ving it. We never stop and won­der that we are being heard in most cases because the recip­i­ents are exer­cis­ing mob-​control. We almost never con­sider that instead of being heard, we are being herded.

When there were lit­tle options and lit­tle oppor­tu­ni­ties, peo­ple knew what they wanted. Peo­ple knew the mar­ket, each other, their needs, and their desires. Now, peo­ple have lit­tle knowl­edge of what they want, and, if they do, they need reas­sur­ance from their peers.

Here I am in an era with an infi­nite amount of options none of which is sat­is­fac­tory. I am in an era which screams FREE­DOM when every­one is a pris­oner of their own mind. I am in an era where we jug­gle between many gad­gets and ser­vices and our to-​do lists get big­ger and longer. We need tables and sheets and agen­das and Excel and three hun­dred web-​apps to keep track of what we’re doing and keep track of all the other apps we use to keep track of us. Every sin­gle aspect of our life has become a tar­get for a ser­vice, and then we have ser­vices and apps which attempt to con­sol­i­date our frag­mented lives into one “box”.

Our minds have become so frag­mented that we fail to see how bro­ken the sys­tem is.

There is a dif­fer­ence between rid­ing the band­wagon and doing things right — though any­one at this point can still the­o­rise at what is right and what is not. Every time I hear “social” I begin to imag­ine a group of sil­hou­et­ted indi­vid­u­als in a grey, bland room with flashy rings and teeth and a pro­jec­tor dis­play­ing some ran­dom info­graph (which have become a com­mod­ity right now and infor­ma­tion unus­able within days) plot­ting their next strat­egy to brain­wash peo­ple en masse.

If I were the word “social” I would have killed myself right now.