यह लेखन हिन्दी में उपलब्ध नहीं है. इसका अफसोस है
Here, I sit again, procrastinating and writing. I’m no expert. I seldom have opinions that are mine and universally correct at the same time. I write in a shit format too. But, there is a thing, called Internet, where people are supposed to share “What’s on your mind?” so, why not?
“No love is original. Mass Culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.” Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse
I’ve some bricks of thoughts. First, “Imagine hundreds of engineers whose job every day is to invent new ways to keep you hooked.” They make us exercise our thumbs in hope to quench our romantics. Continuous flow pages to keep us hooked up to information we don’t need or care about. Advertisements of things we don’t have to buy. Checking our phones even when there’s no notification.
Secondly, from a small age, we learned and were taught (consciously or unconsciously) what is ‘right or wrong’ and what is ‘good or bad’. As children, we never asked ‘why?’ because we blindly trusted the sources: patriarchy, parents, elders and friends. Our circles, often playing the part of mass culture, taught us what is ‘cool’. Then there was the Television with all it’s fancy advertisements, talking as the new mass culture. It taught us what color of skin we should like, what actor-like-brick-face is charming, what body shape is beautiful. We are being programmed and well, most of us don’t even realize. We were learning like any intelligent system does.
“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.”Shannon L. Alder
And now it’s the internet. In today’s Internet age, we may be self-aware but are we aware of our-online-self? The big giants tailor our feeds with information which is an extended chain of our small reflections(on Facebook?—reactions) online. They know what websites we visit and hence the individually focussed ads. They know what kind of jokes make us laugh, who we look online and what videos we find interesting. Hence, out of those useless-subscriptions and people in our list, we always get what keeps us interested, first.
They know what nationalist, feminist and moral posts evoke us. Hence we end up sharing posts about “n photos that show how judgemental is the society” (ironic, right?)What I mean by “They” is not some humans but the algorithms that can extract such tangible information about our personalities and show us what we prefer. “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.“Unknown On the surface we’re just browsing stuff that sounds right to us, feeling connected to the world while under the surface, algorithms decide what information to spoonfeed us. Where are our nationalist and feminist opinions in real life? Our-online-sarcastic-selves may even be actually anti-social outside the screens. Online, we either tend to keep opinions about topics we aren’t fully aware of (ironic. Again.) Or don’t care about them at all (for instance, readers who never made it here). Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. No knowledge? do the math. Suggested Read: How technology hijacks people…
Now, about the quote at the beginning of this post. I might not have written about all that “internet-free-will” shit if my brain had not made an analogy between lovers and internet users. Here, I’ll lay those bricks to form some outline of a piece of art. Barthes actually elaborated the sentence that goes: “Some people would never have been in love, had they never heard love talked about” and I find it self-explanatory. Think about everything that you find “cool” i.e., in love with or feel connected to, morally. If it wasn’t for the mass culture and global connectivity, you’d never like ’n places to travel before you die’ or ‘cutting bread in air at EDM festivals’ or ‘anime’ or ‘French cinema’ or ‘dank memes’ etc. And it’s good! That made us to pull out of genetic evolution and land in a culture evolution. But to what extent? Be aware of which rabbit hole you want to fall into. Don’t let your news feed decide what information is important for you. Make choices. Discover outside.
“You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.“Morpheus