By Sanjana Singh
Do you have this feeling of exhaustion throughout your day? Then guess what you are not alone. Burnout, a feeling of exhaustion, fatigue and tiredness flows through our veins throughout the day. This cynicism for optimal performance and achievement has even made the burnout more problematic. The problem is twofold-the idea and practice of optimization, a task best fitted to machines, not humans. We are human because of our ability to contemplate, love, argue and for our feelings for others, which inevitably requires engagement, time and space. In the name of saving more time via technology, both time and space have been stolen away from us, a heist that has been orchestrated in our quotidian lives. Due to smart tech, digital footprints, mass monitoring and watchful algorithms we have started seeing time as a commodity, it’s no longer lived, it’s monitored, quantified, and commodified.
With technological advancements, the evolutionizing of humans as machines has its obvious perils, humans are being less empathetic and more robotic, carrying machine like behavior in their contemplative space, full clicks, and tangled networks. With the digitization of space, where every single click is monitored, our privacy, both personal and professional, is in danger. One such example of humans turning into machines is, say for instance, computer, which was invented so that it could speed up our task and as a result we would utilize that time by spending quality times and nurturing personal connections with family and friends, getting more time to engage in our hobbies, but what has it made of us? In a world of commodity culture, being free is overrated, even considered a crime. The call is very clear – we need to be productive and accelerate.
To exacerbate this quotidian reality, the establishment and normalization of “The watched society” has led us to a point of surveillance, being gazed and observed all the time. The digital determinism made us enter the panopticon 2.0 where we are under constant watch. Our journey from achievement society to algorithmic society came with a cost which demands our peace, health, time and privacy. The concept of personal time and space has almost vanished as we are available just a click away and there is no off-switch in our pre-occupied mind. The mass-monitoring culture is re-writing our perspective of freedom and personal space. We, as individuals, have become scattered individuals who are no longer unified and have different fragments for different platforms, as per requirements. This fragmentation isn’t just limited to our online presence—it reflects deeply in our personal lives as well.
Technology has become a double-edged sword- it connects us globally, but disconnects us even from closer one, including our surroundings, which we resolutely fail to witness. Let’s take another example. Consider how parenting has evolved in this technological era. The most common and observed example of this in domestic settings is we are all aware how parents introduce kids to technology. Smart phones and giant screens are their new best friends. They wake up from Alexa and fall asleep to Siri- The universal best friends. What an irony indeed!
The technological convenience comes at a price, remember the time when bedtime stories were a daily ritual, comparatively, this has been replaced by YouTube videos with air pods in ears. In a recent conversation, a friend of mine was telling me how his child is having delays in speech and has slow cognitive development. Children suffer from problems like ADHD, reduced attention span etc. The reason for this was quite obvious- we replaced our role with technology by handing them them smart phones and I-pads and the excessive use of which hindered the brain development. As per the report of National Institute of Health, calling kids as “digital natives “it was found that screen induced disease are rapidly increasing among young children. Based on the research linking to depleting brain development among kids’ country like Sweden is banning the use of screen among toddlers.
I find it so ironic that technology was invented to make us fast and connected, but it eventually made us busier, injecting in us, a sporadic supply of abstract violence. The fact is simple, speed and contemplation are diametrically opposed to each other, much in the way as computers and humans are. We do not have time for the people who really matter to us. The perpetual connectivity due to digitalization of space and time has become a myth as we are mediated through connections. Do we need to reconsider it as a sign of pause and stillness? Yes or No! The choice is yours.
Contributing Author: Sanjana Singh is a freelancer. She can be contacted at sanjana22work@gmail.com
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