Social media | Random thoughts of a confused primate

When I watched The Trueman Show for the first time, as a kid, it completely went over my head. I couldn’t understand it. Why would someone pay to watch another person’s life. That too 24×7. The idea seemed absurd and idiotic. I watched it again recently after almost 2 decades. My wife didn’t know that it existed. It started with us watching the Netflix special ‘The Social Dilemma’. At the end of the day the entire concept of social media is to let other people know what they are doing in their lives. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are like an audit trail of people’s lives. Or at least the events that they deemed to be important. So I was reminded of the movie which now I feel was well ahead of time.

Side-bar: May be I should sell this idea to these IT giants. Most of the celebrities are avid consumers of social media. So why not automate writing of Biographies?

When ever google photos a notification on my phone saying ‘5 Years ago today’ or ‘2 Years so today’ it scares the hell out of me. I feel like I just received a note like 👇

Anyways, my wife doesn’t like spoilers, so I did not tell her what it was about. Though we still don’t understand the joy people derive from watching/knowing about others lives, we understood that it was possible. The times we live in are where every Tom Dick and Harry television network is full of so called reality shows. So it now made sense.

May be it always did. May be having parents who did not gossip (bitch) about others made me ignorant of the trait most of us have. Curiosity. Not in Science, not in spirituality, not in seeking the purpose of life but in what our neighbors are doing. May be if everyone lived in houses made out of transparent glass, we wouldn’t need televisions anymore.

It’s not just adults, take a bunch of kids who receive presents. Everyone would be more curious about what others got. They would be restless until they know that they got something better than others or may be until they are sure no one got something better than them. Next comes education. Whenever grades are announced first we look at our grades and then ask everyone around about theirs. Strangely the only ones we retain are the ones who did better than us. I’m sure that the sadness of a low grade was always washed away on learning that our friends didn’t do any better either.

But before the Orkuts and Facebooks came along, this was it. We just frown for a day or two and you were done. But any like and comment on the posts by anyone you know will keep rubbing salt into the wounds of your failures. We forget about your life and get fixated on others.

As a kid I used to watch tons of Discovery channel. It was informational and it was educational. Well theoretically it still is. But lately its focus has been on teaching survival skills in the wild and fishing techniques. That’s reality TV too. Feels like attempts to make non fictional versions of Cast away. This is the PG rated version of reality TV if you believe eating animal shit and insects wouldn’t scar kids for life. The more popular versions of this reality based television programming are borderline voyeurism.

Truman show was truly a movie made ahead of its time. But looking at the world around me I think we are way past the concept of the show. People are volunteering to be on reality shows. A side effect of people starting valuing themselves based on the number of followers they have online or the number of likes they get. I always thought that the word Celebrity meant that a person celebrated for something they have achieved. But now it just means popular. All you have to do is let people watch you. For every video on the internet, there are 10s of videos of people filming themselves watching them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyL78n4wIiw

But I still don’t understand why one would want people to follow them and watch them all day long. If Voyeurism is watching people in intimate moments, whats the word for wanting to be watched?

Any typical school kid from India must have learnt about Ashoka – The Great. He once ruled the entire Indian subcontinent. What we were thought in school was that he was a great king, he got trees planted along the side of the road to make travel easy. It may not be the most important thing he did in his life but again I did not write my text books. The symbol of a 24 spoke wheel on Indian flag is his legacy being celebrated. But he wasn’t always great, in fact he started out a terrible ruler and only changed after the battle of Kalinga. He self reflected and had a realization after massacring thousands of people. He did not completely cut out violence after that but he became a far better person. If he were living in this day and age, #AskohaTheTerrible would have been trending after his first war. I am actually waiting for some descendant of the people he killed to start an online petition to remove the Chakra from the Indian flag.

In the movie Munnabhai MBBS, there is a scene where a pick pocket tries to pinch the wallet of an elderly person. Get gets caught in the act and immediately the people in the vicinity transform into a lync mob and start trashing the wanna be thief. The elderly man intervenes and asks the thief if he wishes to be left at the mercy of the angry mob. He goes on “These are the citizens of our country. See the anger in their eyes? One just had a fight with his wife, someone’s son isn’t heeding his words, another is jealous of their neighbor and someone got a scolding from their landlord in the morning. They never speak up there, because they lack the courage. They will show all their anger on you.” Even though the move came out in 2003, it was right on point about the general outrage not just in India but around the world. In a way that scene was written well ahead of its time.

“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables, says that there are no worthless people, they are like that because of their upbringing. I do not agree completely to the statement. I understand the premise, but I feel that there is a point in every ones life when they are a weed. But most people in normal circumstances, get out of this phase and do make something better of themselves. At least they try. The ones that do not try, even if the conditions are favorable are really worthless. There is a difference between a person who sends you an email that he is a Nigerian Price who can send you his fortune if you pay the customs fee and Lehman brothers. There is a difference between a guy who ogles women in a bus stop and someone like Harvey Weinstein. The former are either victims of circumstance or still in that stupid phase. The latter are the worthless people. If Hugo was alive, he would definitely call them the result of bad farmers.

But, just like the people who tried to trash the pickpocket in the movie, the people now a days are finding it difficult, in fact even more difficult to distinguish between the two. The social media, especially twitter is full of people who, like a pack of wolves waiting to pounce on any and every mistake made. I have been hearing about the numerous lives destroyed for something someone did or said decades ago. Last year, a top executive in Boeing had to leave the company for an article he wrote 29 years earlier that argued women shouldn’t be in the defense forces. There is a separate pack on stand by to attack people on separate issues, ideologies. When the liberals do it, the conservatives call it Cancel culture, but when they do it they refer it to as protecting the moral standard of the society.

Be honest and name an Ideal person. A person who never did any mistake in their life? Aren’t you yourself embarrassed if not ashamed by things you did or said? I am. I have many instances of things that I did that I was not particularly proud of . I am sure many of the poor souls who got kicked out of their jobs because of the cancel culture are too. Most Indians would name Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation as an example of an Ideal person. But he too did not stand against racial injustice as soon as he saw it. He did not change until things got personal and he was kicked out of a 1st class carriage on a train in South Africa. Speaking of South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s first wife accused him of beating and being threatened with an axe.

The public shaming has now gone on to such ridiculous lengths that one mistake in judgement can end your life as you know it. It doesn’t matter if its a simple joke between friends, or even if the so called victim the twitterati imagined was not even offended by the action. It doesn’t matter if the matter is stupid and personal or even purely accidental. The world is a complex and messed up place. You cannot apply the same medicine to every disease, each and every one of the have to be looked objectively. If one feels outraged or angry at someone, take a moment pause and think about if what they did was just stupid or unintentional. Check if you are really looking at a weed or if its a plant that needs to be forgiven for one mistake. May be sometimes they were speakeing the truth and you just didn’t like it.

It is necessary to take out the weeds but it is also important not to take an axe to every tree with a crooked branch. If we do that, we may end up in a world with no trees. Our society as a whole is becoming too politically correct for its own well being. There is a saying in India that a person with Jaundice sees the entire world as green, which is equivalent to seeing the world with ‘Tinted’ glasses. They also say a picture is worth a 1000 words, not sure how much a video is worth (24 frames*number of seconds*1000?)