Observer
For nearly twenty years I have existed on the outskirts of society and, from this isolated vantage point, I have come to despair of what our Western society has become and is becoming unless there is some sort of deep cultural shift for the better.
A fall caused by one of my hypermobile ankles dislocating, a lack of Ehlers-Danlos specialists in Wales and my local NHS Trust illegally by refusing to fund appropriate rehabilitation in England while offering no treatment in Wales meant that the pelvic injury from that accident immobilised and kept me bedbound for the best part of ten years.
Awareness
It put me in a wheelchair, ended my career, took away any choice I had regarding where I live due to a lack of wheelchair accessible housing in the area, left me with no social life, impacted massively on my experience of motherhood and my young son’s life – and ended the life of my second child.
But, by being forced on to this social periphery, I was placed in a position to observe the world around me.
Having spent three years studying Sociology and five years studying the media – including three at the UK’s first and most prestigious School For Journalism – I, like others with the same or a similar education, probably have a slightly different perspective than many.
Combined with my Autism, eye for detail, ever-enquiring mind and two decades of isolation because of illness, I’ve had more than enough time to look at our culture, how we represent ourselves, how we behave and the changes that have happened and keep happening – and I am so tired of what I see.
We all have differing levels of awareness, think about and concern ourselves with different things, in different ways. As outspoken as I can be (usually in support or defence of some vulnerable group or cause), I am, according to some, ‘too sensitive’.
A woman I have since removed from my Facebook Friends list decided to display a somewhat toxic trait to me recently in response to me posting about my pain levels. They’d driven me close to insanity. In a book I read about pain years ago (I can’t remember its name now) were details about the psychological value of us expressing our feelings regarding our pain. It was stated that doing so can actually help decrease our agony and, in doing so, helps chronic pain sufferers cope. Sadly, the woman in question is apparently unaware of this and decided to criticise me for expressing myself.
Her comment opened with her saying she didn’t want to be rude, ‘but…’, which we all know means that’s what’s coming is going to be rude. She continued with ‘I know you’re sensitive…’ which was surprising to me given the strength of sentiment in many of my social media posts.
I smiled to myself.
Am I sensitive?
Or are the majority of people simply not sensitive enough?
Superficial
In the early 2000s, I worked for a number of internet start-up companies in city centre Manchester (UK). This was during the days when getting and keeping a site online required big budgets to cover high burn rates and a team of people from programmers and tech support, to writers, photographers, graphic designers and marketing teams. It involved registering your domain and details with Nominet so owners were logged and recorded.
This was before the illustrious rise of social media, when some (not all) people had mobile phones and landlines and face-to-face communication still dominated human interaction. The internet was growing, but we were in no way addicted to or dependent upon it in the way we are now.
And in many ways, I think humans were better then.
We can't put
the genie back
in the bottle...
When people heard I worked in the online world, most were intrigued by this still alien world, asking me what I thought of it.
I’d answer by telling them that I believed governments needed to legislate for it, introduce some sort of regulations to help monitor and control the beast it would become because of its potential to negatively impact on society.
Afterall, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle…
Looking at it all with retrospect and an older, more experienced mindset, I don’t think the internet was or is the problem.
We are.
Missing
I think there is something missing in us. I think humans must have some sort of deep dissatisfaction or void inside us for us to behave as we do.
We have long proclaimed ourselves to be the most intelligent species on this planet. But how can that possibly be true hen we are constantly shitting on our own doorstep and destroying the environment upon which we depend for our survival?
We know, for example, that our use of fossil fuels is going to be disastrous. Yet people complain about and fight against the construction of wind and solar farms because they will ‘spoil the view’. Meanwhile, areas that have been mined are a mess.
When I see stories about this online, I want to take those privileged people by the scruff of their necks and drag them to poorer places and countries that have been ravaged by the industrial impacts of extracting fossil fuels. Such people would rather we continue the relentless pollution of this planet, continue lining the pockets of the already rich who are profiting from fossil fuel use, than choose the safer and cleaner alternatives we could be using.
It's short-sighted. Selfish.
It speaks of people not giving a single shit about the descendants who will live in an increasingly damaged world in the future. They don’t care – as long as they can look out of their rural windows and see what they want to see.
Meanwhile, there’s an increasing amount of rubbish being dropped and duped on our streets, along our roadsides – with some humans even driving miles into the countryside just to dump bin bags full of rubbish in the forests and hedgerows.
I don’t often leave the place where I live because of my body, but every time I travel to one of the nearby towns (and even within the limits of this historically significant village sitting on the edge of a famous National Park) I am shocked by the amount of litter casually strewn everywhere.
I don’t understand how humans are so happy to continue tis rubbishing and easily preventable spoiling of our surroundings.
From the huge fossil fuel industry down to the person throwing their Costa coffee cup out of the window as they speed along the local dual-carriageway, we have regressed in so many ways.
Navel-Gazing
But surely, somewhere, some time, we must wake-up, employ some of our intelligence and draw a line?
Part of this regression includes the internet and the apparent rise in superficial, self-centric content. Content that drives an increasing level of consumption.
In the Eighties and Nineties, we saw a different social consciousness emerge that spoke of positive change regarding protecting the environment and, in turn, humanity. We were focused on creating nuclear disarmament, ethical consumerism and other things that were meant to improve life here.
Now, social media platforms are crammed with people performing dances like trained seals, fast fashion parades, fillers, filters and make-up techniques.
We have become preoccupied with how we look rather than what we do and the ramifications of our actions.
Shake your ass, show some flesh and people will flock towards your content. Post a vacuous video and it will get a million views – while one showing something that actually matters is likely to be ignored.
I get it – we are animals with base drives, attracted to stereotypical things and wanting distractions from the stresses and monotony of twenty-first century life.
But surely, somewhere, some time, we must wake-up, employ some of our intelligence and draw a line?
The recent backlash against the Met Gala with #LetThemEatCake does give some hope that humanity has not wholly fallen into some superficial state, that there are still groups fighting for social justice, ethics and change…
…Words that are very dirty according to the forever handbag-flapping anti-woke brigade.
But thirty minutes spent browsing YouTube comment sections were, for example, grown adults coo over a toddler or young child performing sexualised dance moves instead of them being critical of the fact that young children are copying such things from those around them and hope can soon evaporate in the face of this corruption of innocence.
Hope
Don’t get me wrong…While I see the internet as giving us an outlet for the seeding and spreading of superficial and questionable things, I do also see positives.
Social media have, for example, allowed people in Gaza to show the world what is happening to them in unprecedented ways. It has taken the control of narratives out of mainstream news agencies’ hands and given us more power regarding what we see.
However, some people, despite contrary evidence, will always choose to believe what they want to believe, and we appear to live in world of strengthening polarisation, one where division is on the increase.
We have moved away from a collective determined to foster agreements of unification and peace, to one where governments seek to ignore and sanction The Hague, defy, deny and ignore international justice and laws because nothing is more profitable than war…
…As the rising share prices of arms manufacturers shows.
We struggle to put healthy food on our plates and heat our homes while utility companies and supermarkets record profits running into hundreds of millions or even billions of pounds or dollars and their executives are on six-figure salaries.
All the while, the press talks about a ‘cost of living crisis’, telling us that the rise in prices is due to companies’ costs – but if these costs were so ghigh, then profits wouldn’t see a rise.
We are not in a ‘cost of living crisis’.
The crisis is in corporate greed.
And we would rather fawn over vacuous videos online than face and fight harsh realities.
Wormhole
We seek shallow satisfactions under the rule of the wealthy
who yield a merciless,
self-serving power and tell
us to tighten our belts.
After two decades existing as an observer, I feel like we have fallen through a wormhole into some shallow, insincere, self-centred reality.
One where the rich get richer and we are increasingly enamoured of and distracted by celebrity.
Who cares about homeless people, disabled people losing their main source of income and being driven into poverty and the UK’s failing health service as long a Britain’s Got Talent is on TV every week?
During the pandemic when people were stuck at home and in fear of the future there were changes online. Those who never really posted about injustice or discrimination suddenly cared and supported causes, helped fight the good fight for things they hadn’t spoken of before.
But then life returned to normal and they stopped caring.
Why?
Because, knee deep in their own lives, they stopped observing – as I have observed for these twenty years.
Mainstream society stopped looking, fell back into their short attention span, lack of critical thinking and compassion and chose insular superficiality again instead.
We, as a whole, have lost our way. We seek shallow satisfactions under the rule of the wealthy who yield a merciless, self-serving power and tell us to tighten our belts.
From social media down to our everyday existences we have become dancing hairless chimps preoccupied with unimportant things as our cultures disintegrates into a meaningless mire...
...And I, for one, after decades of watching,
am sick and
tired
of it all.
