Social Media Addiction and Downside

It is scary. The three apps I most often use are Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.

They are all owned by the same business entity, which has more customers than many corporates, more users than populations of many nations and more followers than some religions.

I ask myself, what happened to the pleasure of speaking on the phone? Increasingly we can use our fingers more than our vocal chords. 

Our life routines and special moments are punctuated by electronic images and words that can be disposed as fast as they are created, or so we think. The huge number of records of every human being having access to wi-fi grows exponentially and are not just kept by the person who created them. Data is over analysed but not necesarily for benign and progressive purposes.

Data is not just kept on an aggregate basis, but details can be sliced and detailed. 

The addiction to using apps can be experienced akin to the pleasure of drug induced states, gambling thrills and rewards of repeatitive behaviour. Is communicating through social media really the same as meeting up face to face with social friends?

Have you observed how often software updates are required of you? Are such updates of more benefit to your provider than to you as a user?

It is easier to access electronic records than physical ones. And not just by you.
Each of us resents being manipulated by others in the face, but can willingly increase our risks of further manipulation by forces unseen, unheard and unrealised.

We have been induced to look for information the easier way by Googling, but have we truly stopped to query about the validity of such purported facts? 

It is easier to search for news on screens than to read them on paper. This simple situation illustrates the two edged sword nature of electronic information - easier does not mean true, harder does not mean fake, faster does not mean sincerity, slower does not mean not meaningful.

The sanctity of ethics is not protected, because it can be subserviant to other demands and priorities of your provider of the data and information you digest. Your personal data, life moments and images which you happily contribute to cyberspace are not yours for privacy anymore, but swallowed up to in turn sell you not just consumer goods, but ideas, politics and cultural beliefs. 

The Big Brother is smiling - even more as it is so easy for individual human beings to tell Him everything. 

You, as a speck on this Earth of human beings, can be naive to want to share and connect, but you have compromised yourself in this process. You are also possibly connecting unwittingly to forces darker than what you thought exist.

Such forces can be too big to fail and each of us are too small to resist. Despite regulation, protests and hearings, the relentless push of the giants carries on.

#yongkevthoughts