Caught In the Web

A FRIEND’S 11-YEAR-OLD SON HAD TROUBLE with his phone. There was a technical glitch and he was forced off the grid for 40 hours. When his phone got to work again, he had many messages on an array of social media applications—2,149, to be precise.

Meals were put on hold or rushed through at sonic speed, home interactions were ignored; even the urge to visit the washroom was deferred, apparently, in a bid to sift through the pings and feel ‘back in the loop’ again.

Which is mild behaviour, compared to a case re­ported of two brothers hooked to social media and gaming. These teenage boys had no time for meals, for bathing or changing their clothes. They reportedly ignored phone calls and the doorbell. They didn’t budge when thieves broke into their apartment, twice. They’d begun to urinate and defecate in their pants, while gaming.

The brothers were treated for a month at the psychiatry ward of RML Hospi­tal, Delhi, to loosen the hold of their addiction. Other similar cases prodded the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences to establish an OPD for cyber addiction.

Is this another article, then, on the dark effects of technology? On screen craving, on the irrevocable effects of cyber bulling, on the spiralling incidents of anxiety disorder among seven-year-olds, on depression proven to be caused by social media, on the trebling rates of suicides among adolescents, especially girls, on cyber stalking and trolling, on forced porn videos posted by fathers or uncles or strangers of girls and boys who aren’t yet 10, and more of such?

That’s all rather unpleasant. In the stress of our day, we can’t care. Our lives, our work, our world and business are so inextricably linked to tech.

And in ways that are good, too.

Take transport—hail a ride in moments. Book tickets—flight, train, bus, film and plays—in minutes. Buy groceries, order a meal, call for laundry services without budging. Ask Alexa what the temperature is, or the recipe for tiramisu. Write an article, take a picture and post it on the web. Call for help. Raise aware­ness or funds for a cause. And bigger stuff— consider money transfers and welfare schemes. Tens of millions of people, especially in remote areas, receive funds directly into their accounts. No middlemen, no siphoning. Entire villages supported by craft, retail on the web, reach­ing their clients around the world. Banking, insurance, services, trade, retail, legal coun­sel, information—all at the swipe of a finger. Millions of jobs created for techies, by techies, around innumerable ancillary industries. All intertwined, if not entirely based upon, tech.

And more. The opportunity to showcase talent. Amazing talent—musicians, dancers, chefs, artists, speakers, athletes, little children displaying unbelievable levels of mastery, with social media providing the platform to display, to garner followers, to be famous. Through a little screen in our hands.

At what cost?

Situational awareness. The ability to say hello when you meet someone, and wish them goodbye when you’re leaving. The ability to know what food is on the table and what’s on your fork; to speak words and not grunt (and if exceptional, speak complete sentences in response); to be civil, responsive and polite, quaint words now; to walk with our heads at (original) eye level; to watch the traffic, to take in what we see, hear and feel; basically to know what’s going on around us. Situational awareness is a life-saving ability hardwired in us, to save us from threat. Pilots are trained to sharpen it. Our screens are doing the opposite.

More costs in emotional resilience, or rath­er the lack of it. ER is the ability to recognise, process, understand and handle emotion; to respond to stress—from excitement to disap­pointment. To know that life is not a roll of con­stant stimulus, but that to live well, you have to wake up in the morning, be alert to the day, bathe and clean, exercise, cook and eat, take out the trash and pay bills.

For which you have to work and earn— which in turn requires work ethic—a mild sense of discipline and commitment—and the belief, that one will not be handed a paycheque for slick self-marketing, which by the way, we are masters of, owing to the relent­less beating of our own drum and blowing of our own trumpets on social media over and above the noise of everyone else’s drums and trumpets.

Emotional resilience is bolstered in a calm environment. When we have a quiet moment to understand what we are feeling. When we pause in the rush of things to reflect and then collect our response from deep within. Swiping through reels every 25 seconds, posting selfies five times a day, or checking for likes every five minutes does not build emotional resilience. Instead, what builds is a sense of entitlement and excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance—which is the dictionary definition of narcissism.

And how are we doing on physical fitness? Never before have we seen as many six-pack abs as we see now, never before such slimness. (Never before have we seen as many reels, images, selfies, exercise videos of six-pack abs, etc, either). It could be the steroids injected in our food, or the whey protein we’re so casually having, all of which is altering our bodies in ways we do not under­stand. The fact that whey protein puts tremendous pressure on our vital organs including the liver, pancreas and kidneys, is an unglamorous fact that comes in the way of looking good and strong and ‘healthy’.

But all that’s passé. In the physical realm, we are preparing ourselves for chips. Over the past few years, a Swedish company has been testing a chip, the size of a grain of rice, implanted between the thumb and index finger of some of its employees. The chip functions as a credit card and an access key. It helps open doors, operate office equipment and buy cold drinks. A company in Belgium is looking to do something similar, among other instances around the world of implanting chips in the human body.

This is not conceptually new. Pacemakers are an example of electronics as a body part; chips have been implanted in the eyes, brain or limbs of people who suffer a disease or disability. In that sense, chips have been a step ahead in giving hope and the ability of function to people with challenges.

However, chips now are for convenience. Why carry keys when you can open doors with a wave of a hand? Why turn a doorknob using your fingers? Why use your fingers at all? Why read or learn stuff or bother with memory, when a chip with relevant data in the brain, can make one a walking ency­clopaedia? Children will have microchips imbedded into their bones, as a re­searcher admits doing in the film, The Circle, so that parents and caregivers can keep track of them.

Hackers would have a field day too. Private data from imbedded chips—loca­tion, activity, bodily data—all open to hacking. A chip could be hacked to malfunc­tion, to control the chip bearer’s thoughts, feelings and activities. To endanger a life.

A chip would make us smarter as well as more vulnerable. The gap between the chip bearers and those who don’t have chips in their bodies (the unsavvy have-nots) would widen. Experts acknowledge that the ethical dilemmas on the use of body microchips and related technology are increasingly complex.

But, hang on! Why would we want to use chips at all, when (except in dis­ability) our bodies are naturally designed for movement and lifting, and our brain, which is meant to learn, understand, map and function, actually gets better and sharper as we use it? Probably because a company has chips to sell. Just as social media companies grow from us being social, on their platforms, and not in the real world.

WHICH RAISES ANOTHER WONDROUS QUESTION: While we need to be 18 to vote, 18 to get married, 21 to consume alcohol or to have a gun licence (in India), why does a six, seven, eight-year-old have a social media account? Is it okay for children to be obsessed with posting selfies and counting their likes? Do we believe that little ones are capable of negotiating the web which has no checks and balances in design; that they won’t be exposed to uncensored violence, trolling and utter lack of privacy, and if they are, there would be no consequences to their emotional and psychological development?

That’s a crazy thought.

As crazy as thinking that we might be able to turn back the clock to a time when we ‘played’ outdoors to keep physically fit and emotionally joyous, and read real books without distractions, and watched an hour or two of television that everyone we knew also watched, all of which built social cohesion, and helped us integrate with others in real time and space. There’s really nothing we can do to turn back the digital tsunami hitherto unleashed, and our dependence on it. Nothing we can do.

Nature, however, might act up.

Why? Because most servers run on energy and many on fossil fuels.

It turns out that the digital ‘cloud’ is not really a cloud; that our ‘virtual’ interfacing isn’t as virtual as we believe it to be. The ‘cloud’ is untold tonnes of hardware, with cable and fibre optics innocently crisscrossing the oceans and continents.

In 2020, a study by Rabih Bashroush from the University of East London, quoted examples of the hidden costs of digital interfacing. The energy footprint of processing Bitcoin is equivalent to that of Jordan. The streaming cost of por­nographic content equals the energy consumption of Belgium.

Five billion views of one hit song, ‘Despacito’, consumed as much energy as the electricity five small West African countries together consume in an entire year.

Downloading video games is “higher than producing and distributing Blu-ray discs from shops”. Updating games is even more carbon-intensive.

With over four billion internet users stuck to their screens sending emails, messages, documents, photos, videos, emojis, and GIFs and whatever else of fancy, data centres need tremendous amounts of energy to run the grid and process our ever-expanding digital footprint. Downloading 1GB produces 3kg of carbon; watching a film online produces 10kg of carbon only from bandwidth use. Add to that video-conferencing and social-media in­terfacing of increasingly higher resolution on screens and phones bigger than before across multiple platforms, and the energy consump­tion spikes to furious proportions.

But isn’t it more energy-efficient to do things on the web, virtually, than in person all the while? It might be, except that because we think there’s no cost involved, we buy more, re­turn more, post more, engage more, talk more, watch more online videos, forward more mes­sages, most of which serve little purpose. We think it’s okay to buzz the world with whatever impulse we have, however flippant. The pitch of our interfacing is an unwarranted extreme, and the environmental footprint is far greater than what we admit to.

If our untethered digital use were to push the planet to a real Tsunami, and the grid were to come crashing down, would we have access to connectivity, to phone numbers, to ATMs and to money in the bank? Would we have ac­cess to emergency services that are also increas­ingly linked to the digital web? We wouldn’t.

Those who’ve survived flash floods tell us that we would have to turn to people—to neighbours and strangers, and to friends whose phone numbers we recall by memory. We would have to dial them on landlines or reach them through runners. We would be forced to apply quaint, real-world methods that now seem uncool, yet are timeless and in tune with a way of life we knew until just 30 years ago.

We would haveto abandon ourfinely honed selfie-snapshot pose and rise above our brittle, puerile, entitled stance, to put back the ‘civil’ in civilisation.

2024 New Year Issuecelebrationdigital dividedigital technologyIndian societyIndian youth