- Communicate Politics, Communicate Power - September 9, 2020
- Need Wilson, not Alexa! - July 19, 2020
- War of Narratives - May 30, 2020
Its the information age we are living in, and to be precise, let us say we are trying to survive at present. We are surrounded by huge loads of information and our every microsecond is occupied with some or the other kind of information. Across every walk of life, there is a burst of information which is confusing the user between what to choose and what to reject. While, we all are locked down in our houses and the ‘work from home’ virus has spread as much as Covid-19, we are once again experiencing (suffering from) this information overload.
On our mobiles and TVs, variety of information sources are made available right from Ramayana to the unending lists of web series. More the gadgets you have, more and more sources of information you are bound to access. While accessing this, we keep on choosing what to read, listen and see and spend many hours in a day for that. All these activities related to information impact us certainly. It is seen in our behavior, in our personality.
As like the information age, we are also the part of excessive consumerism as stated in the earlier article ‘The Minimalist Crusade’. Every second we are bombarded with numerous advertisements which allure us to buy things. And again we all know, we are driven to, force to buy things which are many times unnecessary and can easily be avoided. At least this lockdown thing has certainly made us believe that we can even survive and breathe without going to malls, restaurants, pubs, online orders and so on.
Its even ok if we are made to buy such things when there is not much necessity of those. Advertisers and other players change our behavior and likings (inclination) to sell their things and we keep falling without resisting the pressure. Its still not much of a problem if it is restricted to things. The concern begins when some people with unknown faces start controlling and changing our thoughts and behavior. It is the thing beyond consumerism or may be consumerism has been brought into our thoughts and behavior. The technique is that just make buy things which are packaged very well, which are glittery and believe that those are good because somebody is saying that yes it is good. And most of the times, we are opting for those things. The fear lies here.
In terms of buying things we are still very much curious and choosy. But, for the information, I doubt we are not. We are made to believe in certain thought processes, certain patterns, events and happenings by some external forces. The age of consumerism has already given us ‘herd mentality’ and information overload has confused us enough rather than educating us. On the other hand, digital dependence has reduced our attention span and focusing abilities. By and large, our intellect has got reduced to 280 characters of Twitter, most of which are spent in tagging somebody else. The digital attention span with all efforts can be stretched up to maximum 8 minutes, when one deals with some really serious information. All this has affected our thinking process, introspecting abilities to certain extent. Even the religious leaders could not convert us into ‘believers’ as fast as information superpowers have done. We are just swallowing the information, like we do with our food while we have gadgets in one hand. Turning the population into blind information believers have always been the dream of rulers, no matter who they are or were. Its our duty to decide not to become information consumers but the information ‘seekers’.
We all need to stop our rushing vehicles or at least bring them to ‘first gear’ and think that are we so susceptible to such information conspiracies and traps. While we can’ go much outside, lets go inside and stir the information garbage we have inhaled in.
