A cursory glance at Twitter trends throws light on the condition of social media today. Over 90% of those trends are bot-driven, an in-your-face attempt at steering public conversation, or at least appearing to – in a direction that they want to take it towards.
And we as hungry observers scroll our time away, every single day.
Debates and arguments, customary of those late evenings that we spent in the dark waiting for the power to return, were at least driven by real people. Whether they made sense or not, in hindsight, seems trivial given that the overall conversation served a purpose. Today’s Twitter and television debates however, are driven by money, and little concern for the facts at hand. And we devour them with relish, salivating for more.
Here is something that I wrote a few months ago, and I am only finding this amplified as time passes by (Elon or no Elon).
What do you think?
Today’s war is not fought in the battlefield.
It is fought in people’s minds.
The downside of easy access to information is the promulgation of wrong information – so it is difficult to know truth from fiction.
But a larger question looms – why do we all fight armchair wars?
People take sides, even if they aren’t Ukrainian, or Russian, or even remotely affected by the conflict.
Something happens, and keys start to click furiously – on Twitter, even LinkedIn. In case of the latter, copy pasted information that is mostly incorrect, but who cares? A few likes is what it takes as incentive.
There should be a word for fake concern – one word like schadenfreude. It would come in abundant use during these times.
A way to react to such news is to look inward – to be thankful that one is not in that situation, and to live life a bit more rather than be stuck in a race that is meant for rats…to know that there is a lot that is taken for granted, and that nothing is more important or precious than peace.
Everything else doesn’t matter – those likes you got on social media when you prayed for Ukraine, or when you came out with your version of why and what – one day we are COVID experts and the next day we become foreign policy gurus…not what was meant when one spoke about skill upgrades:)
As for the war itself, no war helped anybody. Sri Krishna tried till the end to avoid the inevitable, but when it did, he went through with it.
Because human nature is imperfect. Because we still hate more than we can love, and because we still care about ourselves more than others. Till these imperfections exist, conflict will as well. This is the bitter truth…