When I was younger a lot of things seemed like important dramatic events. First girl friend, first kiss, breaking up, new shoes, playground fights and all the minute things that one experienced as a young person seemed important and dramatic. It's youthful egocentricity that does that I suppose.
But one grows up and one watches the news, one's world becomes wider and broader and one begins to see the bigger picture of the world.
Living abroad, going to university, getting a teaching job and watching the young people I taught act as if every small thing was a huge unfolding drama and finally having a family and watching my children grow up and seeing them perceive every personal moment as a dramatic event has led me to that place that a lot of older people find themselves in, the land of seen it all before cynicism.
However it's not just me though is it?
When I was younger there were 3 television channels and television wasn't on all day. The radio was available to listen to and part of my growing up was getting a radio with short wave and listening at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, under the blankets, yes blankets not duvet, to the voices from around the world through a single earpiece looking at the luminous green radio dial. We had newspapers and libraries were free to get books from and we went out to the woods with friends or went on bicycle rides.
I first experienced computers in Singapore when my dad bought an Apple Euro 2 and just a few years later I did first year degree computing on mainframe computers that filled rooms and finally in my last year I typed my essays on a grey box Apple Mackintosh. I had an Amstrad 1512 'laptop' with a green screen and then there were the 500 series PC's running windows that we had in schools, Word and Paint and so on. It wasn't until the late 1990's that the internet came along and so did those old 'brick phones', the first small cell phones, though I had a friend who had one of those big 'walkie talkie' type cellular phones in the late nineteen eighties.
Now it's everything everywhere. People are 'bingeing' on box sets of fiction and as a fiction creator I understand how they work on the emotions and manipulate our state of being, but it isn't just fiction. The internet, 24 hour news channels are now available everywhere.
The internet seems to have evolved into a monster that feeds on 'drama' and nothing is too small an event to publish it with extra exclamation marks and capital letters to emphasise the anger or emotional power; not to mention 'emojis', these pictorial representations of emotional states, to help the 'consumer' of the 'article' understand the correct emotional state to be held in by such 'dramas' as someone pushing into a queue somewhere or a restaurant waiting staff member delivering an undercooked lunch.
My grandparents on my father's side grew up in London and moved to Clacton On Sea and the war came along and my grandfather was conscripted to go and fight and my grandmother was moved away from Clacton On Sea by the council over fears of invasion by the army of the Third Reich, but her nearest relatives were in London and that is where she went, with my father and his brother, both young children. When the blitz on London began they were caught up in the explosive firestorm which hit London and after some months hiding from the bombs
and seeing death and destruction there, my grandmother got my grandfather, away fighting, to write a letter to the Clacton On Sea council and get her and her children back to Clacton On Sea, which happened, the threat of invasion being over. The reason I tell this anecdote is because I spoke to them about their experiences many years later and my grandfather told stories of dead young men, hunger, fear and death. My grandmother told me about people buried in shelters, the shaking of streets of buildings, the feel of blast waves and the smell of burnt bodies and the crying and grief that surrounded her at that time. The point being that this was a 'drama' worthy of reporting as is the plight of the Ukrainian people and for that matter the plight of the people of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Libya... well the list goes on.
The universe is vast, the planet small and the history of the human race will probably be less than two hundred thousand years of the roughly estimated 9.5 billion years this planet will exist before the star that gives it life grows into a red giant and takes life away from it. So when so much of a drama is made of the sexual activities of dancers, minstrels, clowns and jugglers or so much media time, including social media time, is taken up with turning the passing questionable activities or poorly phrased or badly chosen words of such fragile time limited beings as puppet politicians, vain actors and excitable sports people and a host of other so called 'celebrated' humans into 'drama' that obsesses the minds of the many and eats away at their precious and limited time of existence, one wonders, one really does, what the world has come to that what is considered important by the billions of 'posting reporters' and 'internet commentators' would seem trivial and small to past generations and those currently in the midst of true grief and tragedy.
I'm aware of what is news and what is not and I wonder, as an old man now, why the internet, a vast news and information feed, has become infested with the trivial and inane to the detriment of the coverage of the important and a focus on the meaningful and valuable.
They take photographs of you,
You know,
To store in a digital cloud,
Share with the world,
Pronounce you 'friend' out loud.
Their love for you,
Shared with the digital crowd.
These pixel pirates,
Steal your face,
Cut and paste your heart,
Then crop good times,
To fit their frame,
Then trash it when you part.
They take photographs of you,
You know,
No embarrassment or shame,
Images of hours passed by,
That lie within a frame.
Windows open albums,
Of times when you were real,
Pretentious poses for camera phones,
Won't show how you actually feel.
For they define who you can be,
When they photo shop your smile.
Change the background of your life,
To suit their personal style.
They take photographs of you,
You know,
But when the anger upload starts,
They lock you out of your own life,
To 'unfriend' the album's art.
They can wipe your timeline,
Trash your words,
Digitally erase your heart.
Now love becomes a status change,
Hiding hurt with a smiley face,
Access is blocked to happiness,
For the digital human race.
Yes you're just a digital sequence
They can wipe the web page clean,
Human emotion's a virus,
To internet friend machines.
They will trap you in a comment box,
And leave you there to die,
Alone and staring at a screen,
Stuck for a reply.
They'll take photographs of you,
You know,
Which with the world they'll share,
Then they'll delete your profile,
When they cease to care.
First they're friend then lover,
Then they become a hater,
And in their hard drive,
Memory bank,
They'll save you up for later.
Copyright Richard L Wiseman.
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