Hello Everyone. It is I, your Feisty Indian Aunty who watched Clickbait on Netflix with some apprehension. My initial reaction was, “why am I watching this?” But I preserved due to sheer curiosity, and at the end of the first episode, I was hooked and horrified at the events that were taking place in this series.
Is this is what social media is all about? There is video going viral featuring an abducted, beaten-up man, who holds three placards, one after another, saying “I abuse women,” “I have killed a woman,” and “at five million wiews I die.”
Is this not a wonderful treat for all those people who are welded to their mobile phones, and iPads, and computers, to see someone suffer, and to keep sending the video to their friends, watching it go viral, and seeing how long it takes to reach five million hits. Yes, we live in an increasingly visual world, but surely we’ve reached a tipping point.
For someone like me, who did not have a home phone until I was 17, and only getting my fist mobile phone in my forties, Clickbait was a potent reminder of how lucky we were that social media did not affect our lives. Watching this, I couldn’t help but wonder if the good that social media has brought the world has been outweighed by the bad. That initial thrill of being able to connect with people all around the world, to find long lost family and friends, and to share in mutual interests, had made way to this uncontrollable beast that is being used and abused to manipulate elections, spread fake news, and pull us even further apart.
When I got my first mobile phone, I considered it a boon as it gave me access to the whereabouts of my children, and was a great communication tool in case of emergencies. Then we had WhatsApp, which was also fantastic because it meant calling my friends and family overseas was suddenly free. Next thing I knew, here I was, at 73, browsing Instagram, listening to old Tamil songs on YouTube, and listening to The Goggler Podcast. (Yes, that was a shameless plug.)
Clickbait brought home how devastating social media can be on the life of a human being who may, or may not have, done something wrong. But we believe whatever we see online. We are so quick to forward… forward… forward… anything and everything without thinking of the consequences it might have. Why do we believe what we see on our phones so easily? Why do we not think that everyone may have a story? Why do we not consider the impact of our actions? Why are people becoming so judgmental and hypocritical? Have we become so jaded with the plethora of information we receive everyday that we have lost the ability to feel compassion and empathy. Has watching something through a screen disconnected us from the fact that there are real people and real lives on the other side of it?
Social media can male or break a person, it can also build or destroy a nation (as we have seen during this pandemic). And yet, with all of our purported education, with all of the information available to us, we are still so incredibly gullible. I don’t have an explanation for that, except maybe to say that we have become so afraid of what might happen to us if we speak out of turn, that it’s become easier to just blindly agree.
Before the lockdown, I was on a date with my husband of 49 years, and I saw a young couple at dinner. They had just gotten engaged. There were red roses on the table and a ring on her finger. The whole time we were there, they didn’t say a word to each other. They were completely absorbed with their mobile phones. I wonder who she would believe if something like what happened in Clickbait happened to her fiancé? Does her online flock have more say over her thoughts than this man whom she clearly has no interest in talking to?
Clickbait left me afraid. Has social media has completely killed verbal communication. Without actual human interaction, without speaking to someone, and watching them, and learning their individual stories, can we still feel the same kind of empathy for them? Maybe our brains can only process so much information at any one time and this recent bombardment has beaten us into submission and left us more susceptible to suggestion.
Maybe we are indeed doomed.
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