Arshid Malik
Back in the recent past when two lovers were separated by physical distance both would be entangled in a “sweet” mesh of “painful emotions” which would give rise to a more genuine longing for each other followed by decent intimacy, affection and understanding. And this very thing has been the muse of much of prose and poetry that comprises most of the great works of literature. Distance is an aspect of existence which follows the daily social rhythms of integration and compliments civilization in a lot many ways. In the present scenario something very odd yet striking has took place. Distance is being compromised on almost all levels of human existence. As far as the concepts driven to shorten distances by physical reformations were put into action things were fine and the shortening played out good for populations inhabiting the planet, our planet. But in the nineties something else boiled up which caused a stir in social (inter as well as intra) clauses and this was the Internet or more popularly referred to as the “world wide web” earlier on. The Internet set into motion a flow of information which was immense and the immensity of this flow increased with every possible innovation in the field of information technology. It also altered the concepts of distance and perhaps led to the eventual demise of the sociality of distance. Distance has been “manhandled” physically as well as conceptually.
Presently, we are living in an age where we do not need to get up, board a bus or a plane to interact with people who we happen to associate with but rather switch on the super evolved “idiot box” and a few clicks earn us our much needed points. We converse with a multitude of people at the same time via social networks and ideas flow openly across the world. There are no boundaries as such and no barriers at all. It is there at the click of a button – the whole world along with almost all of its “knowledge base”. We have multiplied our “contacts” hundreds of times over but there is almost no “actual” interaction taking place.
This is the “demise of distance” or the “death of distance” which been the hot topic of debate for modern day philosophers, anthropologists and historians. Did we really need to wipe out distances to create a proposed “better social order”?
Social networking sites have multiplied thousands of times over after the birth of the primary, super-evolved “Facebook”. We are connected, almost all of us, via spectrums of light and microwaves but we have stopped interacting socially which is to mean the way it was supposed to be – two people meeting face to face and conversing. And this has led to birth of a neutral reality which has no foundations or principles. It is just a “network” that connects people while killing social concepts and realisms. We are on social networking sites and we are happy only because we lack the power to overpower the overwhelming-ness of non-existent quasi-social nodes. We stand connected 24 x 7 but we have lost the ability to touch.
We have crossed into an unreal platform that does not support physical contact. Furthermore, the Internet has turned so diverse and has evolved to an extent that any kind of information is provided to you without being analysed. There are almost no protocols, at least none social. You look up a single word on one of the world’s fastest super search engines and you get results which run into millions. How would you be able to sift this bombardment of information since it leaves you with little room to analyse and practically associate? So one is able to choose results as per one’s liking and there and then slips in the scope of error! We have constructed super-realities and we are what we want to be on the social networking platform. The people we associate with over the social network, are they real? I suppose no one can answer that question. These people might very well turn out to be software bots. This increases the risk of our dependability on clauses that might not exist while we share information freely and associate overfreely which in turn increases the risk of consequential breakdown.
The idea is that TOUCH is a social as well as physical reality that creates the scope for distance, less or more. And this is the very thing that the social network has distinctly cropped out. We no longer rely on touch and therefore miss out on the physicality of distance. We are slithering down into an abyss that is unreal. We are into a concept that wipes out the very foundation of civilization. We are metamorphosing into automatons who certainly fail to physically interact with social constructs. We are losing our selves to an era of machines and that is not a very fond thought with me. The upcoming generations are geared up to embrace the unreal sophisticated agenda of an unreal world and we are their accomplices. We are an accessory to the ultimate murder of the actual world that kneads out meaning out of the very concept of distance.
