The Great Scrolling Mercurial Mess

Well, a lot has been said, debated, and argued upon pros and cons of social media; of the craving for likes; of the ease to connect and still finding difficult to be connected; of the fading realization of existence of things other than virtual reality; of frequent needs of so called 'virtual detox' and stuff like that.

I am not gonna talk about any of those, and I am not even against social media, for sometimes it is the virtual reality that keeps us going when the 'real' things fall apart.

Having said this, I have a different concern with the virtual world. I have a problem with social media for it makes us go through the plethora of emotions of vast extremes in a fraction of time. For instance, I am reading a post on patriotism for a moment, and then immediately I stumble upon a comic video, and soon on a post with righteous political outrage, followed by some gossip about celebrities, followed by some video trying hard to convince me to do some charity, all these supplemented by quirky memes, and WWE posts every now and then in between.

Well, I like them all, but damn, it doesn't let me settle for a singular feeling for a fraction of time. As I keep scrolling down, it keeps me treating as an 'emotional machine' rather than an 'emotional human being'. It turns the switches of emotions ON and OFF so fast, that I can hardly truly feel anything now. A good post will certainly leave an impact, but just for a while, for it will be washed off so quickly by some other random material being thrown at me vigorously. It's also sad because it doesn't leave a room to ponder or reflect upon anything that I just read/watched, for scrolling down is a norm and I can't be the exception. And soon before I realize, the feeling or charm of a good stuff which I just saw is long gone.

Photo credits: huffingtonpost.com

Not only the random posts appearing on the Facebook wall, it is the comments which we get to read. At times, they are hilarious, more often they are not. I remember a time when 'debate' was visualized as a picture of two groups sitting on two tables face to face, and arguing with reasonable logic and facts, either for or against the topic under discussion. Also, debates occurred on very important topics on which a reasonable contrast in opinions could be understandable. There is no such thing in the virtual debates which we witness in the comments section of almost every post on Facebook nowadays. People fight on the most random topics, often unrelated to the original material posted. And there we see a lot of extremist comments, diplomatic bystander comments, lot of abuse, personal attacks, lack of compassion, ill-informed judgementalism, and what not.

We often witness and participate in the clash of clans (e.g. clans named 'Bhakts' and 'Anti-Bhakts'). We often fall prey to believing in something which is created just by a trend, and then the bullying of people who don't follow the trend. People be sarcastic as it is 'cool thing to do' on internet.

The thing we felt while reading a post, is soon vanished as we read the comments. And no, our view is not corrected for good by reading any of the comments, it is simply clouded. For there are so many contrasting arguments that we don't really know who is talking for and who is talking against it. The whole spectrum of this weird randomness leaves us speculating what should be the message we take from the post. The answer narrows down to - 'Nothing'. And then again, as usual, we continue - scrolling.

And more often than not, we end up spending hours and hours scrolling down without gaining anything.

All these things collectively, don't let any feeling sync in well - and perhaps also makes us less compassionate, and emotionally numb in real life too. We don't have great pleasures or great sorrows, for we move on (read: scroll down) too fast from everything.

And silently but steadily, the virtual demon trespasses the realm and turns us into the 'mercurial mess' from the 'beautiful mess' we originally were.


"Well, happy scrolling" the demon says :D