Digital Redundancey (2013)

 

I ought not to be surprised by my own redundancy, but I am. I am increasing aware that I, like thousands of others my age, am falling behind in a world where communication means cyber, or electronic, rather than interpersonal.

Two incidents crashed together recently, to underline the extent to which my old world values are becoming redundant. Firstly, a daughter announces her marriage to the world (over Facebook), without a thought of privately mentioning this to her father. Secondly, a husband learns of his wife missing her father, over Facebook, again with no thought that the husband ought to have been made aware before an announcement was made to friends and strangers in cyberspace.

Simple demonstrations of respect, and inter-familial communication, seem to be eroded by a world in which instant gratification comes at the click of a mouse, and demonstrations that people (whom you have never met) in cyberspace become more important than those who you are living with. In my creeping dotage I find that quite perverse.

Admittedly my generation would talk for hours on the telephone. That was in the time of the Western world when four old pennies would bring chums, living fifteen miles apart, together for an evening in the privacy of a red telephone booth. Now it would seem that the handset/mobile phone has become more important, with its interconnectivity and all-time access to cyberspace, than the person you are sitting in front of. The distant caller becomes closer than the physically and emotionally close.

I am not the first to point out that the new forms of digital communication are actually hindering interpersonal and family communication. You only have to visit a food court, here in Malaysia, to see just how distant people are becoming to those physically near, and how near they become to those physically absent. It is a complete reversal from the age in which I was brought up. Parents sit, ignoring each other and their children, while they gossip or place ‘important’ telephone calls above the needs of personal relationships. Those children, in turn, sit and play computer games on hand phones or on computer tablets. They interact less and less. Mothers drive glued to their telephones, while their children tap away at the latest game. Passengers not inclined to ‘game’ and cut out from the telephone conversation look on in bewilderment, and sadness.

Full-time connectivity is meaning less and less interpersonal interaction. Is this an addiction? Are the constant phone callers mainlining on their drug of choice - cyber-communication? Could these people who feel a desperate need to be in constant contact be as addicted as any heroin addict, or computer game addict? These are serious and concerning questions.

Recently, due to hacking, I was forced to reduce my Facebook ‘friends’ from over 900 to just 7. It was then, as I closed my original account and started a fresh one, that I became aware of the near addiction ‘Likes’ and comments have become, to some. And the need, by others, to parade the most intimate details of their lives before complete strangers, and ‘friends’ barely met.

It is a new world, but I am not sure if it is ‘Brave’. In our newly constructed 1984 we are informed of the massive amount of government ‘spying’ done through the digital media; informed also that companies in Bangladesh and Cairo manufacture ‘Likes’ for cash, on Facebook. These indicate that privacy is no longer private, and ‘Social Media’ like Facebook may be fuelling a rush towards antisocial behaviour, deceit and snooping. This is not the world my father went to war for, nor the world that my ‘Hippy’ contemporaries wished to create in their ‘high’ visions of Utopia. It is, however, a world in which I find myself increasingly redundant.