As the individual is exposed to vast networks of expression which surround him at every angle and point on the lower grounded reality, he is disturbed and disrupted by these psychic channels that come from shared similarities in the collective consciousness. He is untrusting to the nature of these intervals that split the immediate sense of its presence and the short-lived space that follows afterwards. This phenomenon is universally occupied and belief in a worldview holds little to the magnitude of its daunting appearance.
The belief in a given associating narrative about the cosmos and the origin of life specific to that individual is, and will be, meaningless as he traverses the storm that blows in current permanence. Despite the landscape being one characterized by religious features, more importantly, the divide between the religious and the randomness of events, his pursuit of meaning through influences of culture and tuning into the atmosphere of reality in meditative states are contemplatively subdued inwardly to something that isn’t transparent. This storm may appear as something that hasn’t quite become visible as of yet, but the presence of the disruption in the world is unavoidable. I can’t be the only one that feels a static in the air; anticipation itself is boiling, awaiting its release. After all, it is the process of the immovable unity of man that encourages the future collective experience of our generations, allowing us to define eras. It has never been the case that only one man may define an era; there is always a collective transcending opportunity available to the inhabitants of the current structures in our world, mostly from a psychic and electrical conscious vacuum that comes out of a cultural and global phenomenon.
What is available to us with our edacious appetites?
The absolute strength of our connection with the digital. Online Content: access to all information and all types of media in the world. Access to every piece of music that’s ever been made, access to every book that’s ever been written, access to every film that’s ever been filmed, or in the neighbourhood of it anyway. What do all those points have in common? They are available 24/7, any time of day, at any hour one can have what one wants.
I have experimented with this availability problem. I understand the world we live in is idealistic; what someone dreamt of having 30 years ago has already been accomplished for that individual. One doesn’t have to move their bodies to obtain things anymore; it can be brought to us.
I have purchased my favourite film to watch, I have called my closest companion and authentically socialized with them in the purest form I could, I have purchased my favourite novel to be delivered the day after. All in the same day, all without moving anywhere. I could have laid down, stood up, sat down; it wouldn’t have changed anything. We are physically incapable of adjusting to this intelligence that we both utilize and are enslaved by. The fact that I don’t need to move my body and thus use my thumbs is identical to the cognitive development of a child learning to control their bodies in newly unmarked terrain. This new terrain to this child is what we call ‘earth’ or perhaps ‘the world’ in its simplest form; it is reality.
For example, the child that learns to walk knows never to use their hands again to walk; their legs will walk without the need of the hands to support them. As with ourselves, we have learned that we no longer need to visit shops to obtain things, and that overall this was just a waste of time. We also understand that we don’t need to call up takeaways anymore and talk verbally as we order our food for the evening. Just like dating sites, we have acquired a new cultural tool which allows us to please ourselves without the pure process of obtaining this through intimate communication beforehand. Now all one needs is a phone and some photos, and they can find their opposite who’s searching for the same thing. To make this point clearer, we have acquired the ability to now obtain all this using our thumbs; we are just like the child who learns to walk, and his hands are no longer required to walk. We too no longer need to use specific parts of our bodies to obtain currents from the material world.
These changes in our cognition do not come from our conscious decisions; they are out of our control. They are out of our control because through the evolution of repetitively using these tools we have, so-called, evolved to master them, and now we wait ahead to obtain more tools to use for our development between conscious instincts and economic demands. Through the unavoidable adaptation to the demands of the evolution of society, we have reduced processes inside ourselves. This is not entirely negative; there are many great benefits to this; however, the point is that through this adaptation to the times, we have reduced a capacity that holds its flag in our nature as a creature; this evolution has infiltrated the nature of man, and this is why it is a point worth investigating. We do not know what else in our nature must give way for something else to ease our environmental engagement. Rather, that this civilization is evolving in ways that change our physiology without consent.
In this regard, we have already been biologically surpassed; the ability to change the world rapidly with our thumbs and not the larger, stronger parts of our bodies is the indication that we are moving into a world where the weakest points of our physical utility are capable of transforming the world in ways that the strongest parts of our bodies, all secondary to our mind of course, are not.
This ability to be connected to the digital allows our minds to rest while it connects. This means our social sphere grows; we can talk to anyone at any time and in any part of the world. This is the definition of a network, the vast connectedness shaping matter and time. By rest of the mind, I mean it allows us to tune in submission to the zeitgeist and entertain its rites and manifestos of dialect encouragement and subordinate cultural powers.
The over-socialization of our culture currently is the most serious issue that I observe. If we take note of the simple ‘nature’ of man, he has instincts, drives, and conscious ways of acting that all are universally experienced. If we investigate the commonalities of modern concepts and sociological events that are happening across each domain of society, we can extract the most common threads between them all:
Hedonism
Power
Individualism – Though I would make the claim it is back to front.
Tribalism of ideology
Narcissism and selfishness
The Mental Health crisis
The divide between the only two genders in the world.
The common thread between all of this is the absolute focus on the inner experience. I say absolute because everything permitted from the list is about the individual and their shaky internal lives. The focus on the self is scientifically proven to be the cause of negativity – self-consciousness has been documented to be the precursor to negative regulations of emotion. All of these topics are about the overwhelming relationship the modern individual has with the modern world. Something somewhere is enabling our inner experiences to be targeted and then dominated senselessly, and we feel forced to share this turmoil that we have inside. It appears from a fundamental level of analysis to be disguised as a great social revelation of unity and connectedness.
First, what is an Instagram story?
The expression of a thought? The expression of an interest?
The term ‘story’ shows us exactly its function; it is a detailed photographic narrative of a person’s experience during their day. Suppose we remove technology and for a minute gaze into life before social media; what would that person’s story consist of? Is it different than how it would be today?
Foremost, let us imagine a working man from the fifties utilizing an Instagram story the conventional way it is used today. He would have his morning coffee, perhaps some photos of garden work, house chores, maybe video content of his hobbies. Take the modern person’s approach today; what are they uploading on their story? Most of the time, stories contain threads from other people’s content. The first approach one has towards their own story is that it is fundamentally theirs and about them only. However, the usual choice to utilize a story is to upload content one has seen and found interest in its contents and thought that it would be beneficial to share as a representation of themselves and their worldview, thoughts, and feelings about a particular subject, topic, or event.
Rules are broken when following the logical, definitive grammatic usage on the word ‘Story’. It is labeled as a story because the people who run Instagram believe the person should be entitled to share their story. It is universally understood that one has to write their own story through a series of victories and defeats; it is no coincidence that this tool is known as a story. Instagram uses the word story to invite the individual to document in free range whichever thing they want to. But this virtual epitome, sub-zoomed into something so short and specific to the individual, has placed their soul’s requirement to something as short as an Instagram story.
Let us look into the substrate of Instagram usage. Everyone supports this biological adaptation through comments, likes, and shares—all of support. The matter at hand is that this given tool, the story, is now used to share other people’s content before their own and amongst their own. This, from a psychological perspective, and the story as a tool to share information, is used today to share with their followers something that is of interest to them, and something that has been created by somebody else that mirrors their own world values, ethics, creative interests, and general. This social motion of using another person’s work on their feed to demonstrate something to their followers, is exactly the process of inspiration and influence that happens to us in our consciousness. More specifically, the ‘mind’, the story is now the process of the individual’s thoughts.
Let me demonstrate this in a demonstrative form.
Let’s say I am a painter. If I go to a forest and observe everything and be in total submission to the forest, then I go back to my studio and I sit down after making dinner. I then think about the forest and become aware that I am inspired by this forest, and I relive in memory the details and intricacy of the leaves and the trees, and I then begin to paint on canvas. This process of memory usage, inspiration, and thought happens through the absence of social media; it happens to the individual, one may say naturally. I then may have thoughts that go further about how nature has inspired me, and then I may feel the need to post something on my story that could be of a tree or a forest or something natural a painter has painted. This process is the process of thought; the Instagram story is used as a mechanism to transfer my thoughts in a concise manner to my followers.
This is the over-socialization problem. Our thoughts are considered to be private and for our own engagements and privacy. Now we share them without thought about sharing them. It is not necessarily the case to say that the culture has become narcissistic by frivolous direction, nor have we arrived at this destination through hatred or selfishness, but that the simple use of social media and digital interaction itself is wired and designed in a way that conducts narcissistic and hedonistic instincts that exist within us naturally.
This evolution of human experience, socialization, and documentation of our private lives has forced us to take more critical roles as judges within our social networks, juries of reason and observation. The problem that lies with this from a psychological standpoint is that these instincts that were quieter and more active within non-digital life have been put forward to the forefront of our conscious activity. As we see within society, the entanglement within all of these modern features to modernity is that they are all based around instincts and the natural human inclinations. The instinct to upload on social media is an instinct to share thoughts, not bad at all, entirely wonderful, yet what are the limits to this? Will in the next twenty years we be able to share our dreams? Share our hearts?
If you put a human in front of a mirror, he will gaze at whoever he wishes to see, then he will judge and seek the validation of others to confirm that it is true what he sees, and there in the mirror too will an audience emerge and confirm to him that it is true and false. And there in those moments on stage, he will spin out the turmoil he holds within himself that the audience has generated for his life to take on the form of something else, something the people had dreamt.
