The Mindless Mobs of Social Media

It's the end of another work week and it's been a rather quiet one because of the two public holidays - 1st and 4th of May, Labour Day and Vesak Day, respectively. Usually I'd be quite exhausted on a Friday evening (it's already past midnight, so it's Saturday morning), but today I still have a bit of wind left to carry me through this blog post.

It's amazing how much time people spend on their phones these days. I've long realised, even during the Yahoo chat days on the internet, that texting is very time consuming. So I rarely engage in any of the many WhatsApp groups that I belong to. I treat WhatsApp like email: I check my messages periodically over the course of the day, only when I'm taking a break in between tasks.  And I am certainly glad that I'm not hooked on Tik Tok, Instagram or Tweeter. I've long given up on Facebook too. These are all destroyers of one's time.

I do listen to a lot of podcasts and have many favourite Youtube channels that I watch. But I make sure that I control the time when these activities take place. I usually indulge in them when I'm doing physical chores like house-keeping, bathing or driving. The good thing about repetitive physical work is that it frees your mind to do something else. Hence audiobooks and podcasts are to me the best things that comes of out of technology over the last decade.

One could ask: what's wrong with entertaining ourselves watching Tik Tok videos and texting endlessly over WhatsApp? Isn't that a way of socialising, an activity which, arguably defines what being human is? Don't sharing and enjoying the company of fellow humans make a fulfilling life?

Well, I use work for that purpose. I spend the greater part of the day communicating with people on work-related matters. But I like to mix business with pleasure--not in an unprofessional way though. What I mean is: fun. Why can't work be fun and sociable?

We lament the fact that so much of our time is being tied up with work. If that is the case, why not make the best of it. Every work interaction is also a social one, where one gets to learn and share with fellow colleagues, clients and partners. The problem with so much of our corporate culture is that we treat business as a kind of war with our competitors. Even your co-workers are in competition with you over promotion or recognition. Why should that be so? It is such an unhealthy paradigm.

If work and business is a kind of competition, let it be a sport, where one gets to enjoy the good fight but at the end of the day, whoever wins, everyone had given their best and had had a good time. This is the best kind of socialising--not gossiping about people or politicians we dislike. There's way too much hatred in social media that it has turned into a network of hateful mobs. Not only does it suck up your time, it also destroys your mind.

Hatred, surprisingly forges strong bonds as much as love. You do not need to love the fellow members of your social group, it's enough that everyone hates the same thing. A common hatred makes a mighty mob. 

A mob makes everyone lose their individuality. We do not think anymore; our minds are subsumed and consumed by an overpowering outrage. When we are alone, we are forced to think on our own feet but when we are in a mob, we only sense what the people around us are doing and follow their cue--like flocks of birds flying in close formation, swerving across the sky in perfect synchrony. There is no leader in such a flock--each bird is simply adjusting its movement based on slight changes in its immediate surrounding.

We are individuals, not mobs. We have minds, which, admittedly we need to transcend through meditation,  but not by surrendering them to a mob.  We feel strong by being part of a mob because we have surrendered thinking, which is the cause of so much of our existential fears. The mob is mindless and fearless but that is degeneration rather than enlightenment. So let's strengthen our resolve to be mindful at all times, lest we fall to the seductive embrace of the social mob.