Connected Loneliness

Chapter 1

What I am going to write about is a subject which has been done to death, because it involves the internet and how it has played mischief with the aspirations and expectations of ordinary human beings.

I will start my mockumentary by introducing an average joe, Sam. Sam is a typically developing, healthy individual with no known mental or physical disabilities. He is born to a middle-class family, is quite talented, and a potential leader of the future. He has scored good grades at school, excelled at college and has been vastly regarded as a success story by all people around him. He is not too adventurous, and likes friends. He hopes to give back to society what he got from it, get married, and raise the ideal family. He is starry eyed, and buoyed by the confidence vested on him by his immediate society. He steps into the world to leave his mark on it.

Chapter 2

There is a huge debate these days between those born into the age of the internet and those born just before it hit the planet by storm. The debate concerns the impact internet has had on daily life, and how it used to be (or, rather how beautiful it used to be) before it came.

But before I discuss the impact of the internet, I have to talk a little about the subject of improvements. There are two kinds of improvements that most humans desire. One is personal improvement of the self, and the other is collective improvement of the society. One school of thought believes that personal improvement is the most important, and that only when there is improvement on an individual level can it translate into a collective improvement. The other school of thought believes that collective improvement is more important, and only through collective improvement can personal improvement be fostered.

It is common knowledge that the internet is a tool used to stay connected. It is a tool to rapidly exchange information. It is a tool which came to extremely good use in its early days to keep the innards of the government machinery running and up-to-date with the latest information, so that it would be ready to protect itself at the press of a button.

But a time came when the technology of the internet outgrew the use it was put to, and much of its potential was lying redundant like a vestigial organ, until someone opined that it could be used as a tool to exchange opinions and information among the common man, and immediately. Electronic mail was born. How cool was that!

Chapter 3

So here is Sam, about to conquer the world, when he discovers the internet and its bags full of esoteric information. Right now, Sam can be compared to a food processor. He’s got that ‘new’ smell about him, his blades are sharp and some of his clothes are made in China.

He starts throwing in the vegetables, raw and green, then the fruits and then finally, unable to resist himself, his favourite meat. The food processor starts grinding. It gets hot, and the blades get hotter. The ingredients form a pulp slowly but steadily and Sam is very excited. The motor wears off a little, the blades lose their initial razor-like sharpness, and the mixing bowl looks like its survived a hurricane. Sam is hopeful that the paste (or ‘smoothie’ – as it happens to be called on the internet) will be unique. It will be super-healthy and very tasty. He hopes that his invention will alter the definition of a super-food, raising the bar to dizzying heights.

So he toils hard with all the raw materials, grinding them in his head like the smoothie in the food processor, until he is finally ready to find out the result. With trepidation, he gulps a spoonful of the creation, and requests his friends to do the same. What do they have to say?

But before I declare the results, I must return to his food processor of a head, which is now burning out, exhausted. It has become a huge metropolitan city, really cool stuff going on in there, but lacking a definite identity.

His friends like his ‘super-smoothie’, or at least they hit the like button, which may also have been a result of Pavlovian conditioning, considering the bombardment of information that the internet has become. It never really catches up and Sam’s recipe fades away into oblivion the next day with as much punctuality as it had arrived in his head just twenty-four hours ago.

When he further investigates, he finds that his idea is not really a very original one to start with. Several conscientious surfers have already shared their unique experiences with the food processor, and all resulted in the same inevitable fate. It is an invention, individually designed without being ‘inspired’ by others, which he cannot lay claim to because it has been invented somewhere else too simultaneously or maybe copied several times at the speed that information takes to travel through fibre optic cables, i.e., speed of light.

Anyway, Sam crestfallen and incidentally also burnt out, is so full of miscellaneous information that he is unable to separate the wheat from the chaff, to differentiate and identify his own opinions and ideas from those of the internet.

Sam is officially suffering from identity crisis, and he is not even forty! He has become another grey dot on the human map of the world. He fondly remembers how he used to elucidate the seven colours of the visible spectrum to his classmates as school, but now acknowledges the presence of only the colour white, the all-encompassing colour, the colour of peace. He is now led by the language of the internet, an endless sequence of 1s and 0s, whites and blacks, which even reflects on the white shirts and black trousers he wears to his new office, and a flirtatious 40% grey tee he wears to the pub.

But he goes alone, because he has no one to talk to. That has happened since everybody knows everything about everybody else, making the exercise of talking redundant. Moreover, mass consensus also plays a role here as everybody knows about the best strategies to lead a successful life, therefore everybody is perfectly happy. Additionally, everybody knows what everybody else does when they feel a certain way, making the act of conversation feel as indispensable as Facebook. This makes everybody connected, feel lonely. But this is what Sam thinks, and actually, everybody else too.