WE
AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE INTERNET VIS-À-VIS THE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS. BETWEEN
REALITY AND VIRTUALITY: THE CHANCES AND THE RISKS.
(This far we have
come.)
Kingsley Anagolu
University of Bonn, Germany
INGRESS:
Once
upon a time, a nice friend of mine sent me an interesting reality joke per my Twitter
handle. This was a conversation between a father and her lovely daughter who
wrote through E-MAIL to her father. The girl wrote:
“Dad,
am in luv wt a boi who livs faraway frm mi. Am in d US n he livs in London. We
cam 2 kno ourselvs 2r PARSHIP, a d8n WEBSITE n bekam ril friends 2r FACEBOOK.
We hv bn maintaining our frndship 2r WHATSAPP chattin. He jst proposed marrg 2
mi via SKYPE n now we hv had a closer rlship since den 2r VIBER. Can u cull mi
2r IMO n gv us ya fatherly blessings n gud wishes. Ya luvly daughter.”
The
father wrote back to her through HOTMAIL:
“Mai
daughter, 2r my LINKEDIN conekshn I recivd an SMS ALERT jst ystdy dt am nw one
of d minsters of d federation n un4tunately nw, am in a VIDEO CONFERENCE wt d
president. Hence, jst snd mi ya BBM pin 2r GOOGLE+ so I can snd u d blessings.
Hwever, I tink dt both of u shld marry 2r APPLE FACETIME. Hav fun 2r TANGO, buy
children frm AMAZON n snd dem 2 skul 2r GMAIL or per POST. Snd mi d pix 2r
TWITTER or INSTAGRAM, n if u ar no mor satisfied wt da marrg, sell ya husby
ONLINE 2r EBAY. Wll cull u via TELBO later. Ya luvly dad.”
After reading
this text, I could not control the laughter which took over me; but as the
laughter waned, serious thoughts set in and it dawned on me that this is how
far we have evolved in terms of our communication skills and how we now relate
with/to one another: parents to children, children to parents, friends to
friends, all to one and one to all. I got worried. Now whoever is not
contemporenous would find it difficult understanding the above message which
seems like a mumbo jumbo and even those who are following the trend of things
would really have to re-read the message (over and over again) in order to
comprehend it all. This indeed is where we are – the “smart” era.
Detour:
The theory of
evolution, not only of species, but of all things, is at once captivating as
well as it is intriguing. Man in his rapid development, and in the bid for a
better and easier life, draws all things towards himself, either to use them to
his advantage, or inadvertently to be used by them in an indeterminate and
indeterminable symbiotic relationship. Thus humanity in its quest to reduce
space and maximize time, just to “conquer and subdue” his limitedness and
finitude, has come a very long way to a point where it can say: we have made a
giant stride! Indeed! Such strides shoot in different directions where humans
engage, be it in the arts, culture, economy, humanities, science, music, politics,
education or technology, the stories resemble themselves. But let us put this
write up in proper perspective. We take a closer look at science and
technology, or we might just say, let us break it down to information
technology (IT), advancement in the area of human communication and
infotainment. This ultimately involves the internet and the media of
information that also serve as media of education and entertainment which are
the tripartite functions of the media, be it mass, electronic or print. These
contain and provide intellective, instructive and recreational elements in
themselves, or ought to.
But let’s rewind
a little bit to the introductory leitmotif. The dialogical “communication”
above between the father and his daughter was actually meant to be a joke but
it is actually no more a joke since it captures the very essence of the quality
of the relationship and communication we maintain today: we with the social
media and we among ourselves. We have developed all sorts of mechanisms and avenues
made possible in “smart apps” to get us more connected and indeed, through the deluge
of these modern social media, we are more connected as never before. Or are we?
However, there lies the paradox of our desires. The more we get connected, the
more we get disconnected. What an irony! Sherry Turkle, an American
sociologist and professor of science, technology and society from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes this paradox in her book “Alone
Together” as “connected but alone,” more informed but less educated. Ever since
the invention of the information super highway, the World Wide Web, and lately
in connection with the mobile smartphones and devices, we can now reach one
another and gather information as and when we wish, just in a twinkle of an eye
and at the flip of the finger either through Badoo, BBM, Bebo, BlackPlanet,
Classmates, Cyworld, E-Mail, Facebook, Flixstermy, Friendster, Gaia Online, Google,
Google+, Habbo, Heritage, Hi5, Hyves.nl, Ibibo, imo, Instagram, IRC-Galleria,
iWiW, Kaixin001, LinkedIn, Meetup, MillatFacebook, Mixi, Multiply, MyLife,
MySpace, myYearbook, Nasza-Klasa.pl, Netlog, NING , Orkut, PerfSpot, Pinterest,
Reddit, Renren, Skype, SkyRock, Sonico , StudiVZ, Tagged, Tuenti, Twitter,
Viber, Wer-kennt-wen, Whatsapp, Wikipedia, Xing, Yahoo, Zorpia and that’s just
but a few. Yet we are now as never before in dire need of knowing ourselves, one
another as well as having quality information by and large.
At the wake of and
even within the periods traditionally called the “seven mass media” including (1)
PRINT (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. in the late 15th
century), (2) RECORDINGS (gramophone records, magnetic tapes, cassettes,
cartridges, (3) CDs, and DVDs in the late 19th century), (4) CINEMA
from about 1900, (5) RADIO from about 1910, (6) TELEVISION from about 1950, things
were determinable and to some reasonable extent controllably qualitative as it
concerns human relationships, information and communication. But soon came the (7)
INTERNET and MOBILES, especially the smart ones and tablets, and the stories
changed forever. Now quantity and quality (of the things we do and the life we
live) are at war.
PROGRESS:
The
7th of the mass media – the Internet – which is the global system of
interconnected computer networks that use the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide is a network of
networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and
government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of
electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. This carries an
extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (www), electronic
mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.
The
origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States
government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via
computer networks but the linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the
early 1990s marks the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet and
generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal,
and mobile computers were connected to the network. Like said, ever since this
internet period and lately in its interconnectedness with the mobile smart
phones and devices, human communications, interactions and relationships have
been exponentially and substantially redefined. Prior to this new
internet/smart-device era, it used to be arduous trying to source for
information or reach out to one another in a simple, fast and unlimited way despite,
as it were, the existence of books and electromagnetic telephone technology. That
inability alone was the enabler to the real industriousness in research and especially
intimacy between folks, where brothers and sisters, friends and parents
travelled miles in order to commune with one another. There used to be the
modern day “Areopagus” that forms a
meeting point for real time interactions and information sourcing, ranging from
libraries, supermarkets, schools, market places, churches, etc. This guaranteed
and sustained the possibility and reality of a real time intersubjectivity
among people, what Martin Buber – the Jewish/Austrian religions philosopher – called
“I-Thou” Relationship. Here, persons encountered persons in their personality,
real identity, height, weight, colour, character, body fragrance, emotions and
humanity. It was a time when folks looked at one another face-to-face and
smiled together, laughed together and cried together. It was a time of real
connection made possible by the knowledge of the fact that it was not easy to achieve,
not knowing when it could happen again. People appreciated and sustained this
reality. Now the explosion in the internet/digital communication technology in
the late 20th and early 21st centuries made prominent
another Reality which is far from what used to be, namely, that the single Reality
has got a twist, having got a branch to itself which is virtual (Virtuality).
One asks oneself certainly what this all means. As
the theme of this write-up suggests, there has been birthed a sociological fact
of double standards of reality within which folks now operate in terms of what
they do and who they are, namely, the ‘Real-Reality’
(RR - REAL-ITY) and the ‘Virtual-Reality’
(VR - VIRTUAL-ITY). The former represents authenticity and concreteness,
the authentic self. This is the world where we encounter people as they really
are and know them in whom they are. It is the world where people live with
their permitted imperfections and limitations, encountering one another in real
time humanness. This differs from the virtual-world or Virtual-Reality (VR or
Virtual-ity), where people construct an “avatar personality,” selling different
shades of counterfeit identity to different people. This is similar to an “immersive multimedia” or “computer-simulated
life,” which replicates an environment that simulates physical presence in
places in the real world or imagined worlds and lets the user interact in that
world where one could successfully hide ones identity and put up a smoke screen
type of life. Worthy of note is that this “Virtual-Reality” has gained so much
space in the “Real-Reality” that most people can no more distinguish between
the two, and this makes people to lead a parallel life similar to that of Mr.
Jekyll (who plays the good guy) and Dr. Hyde (who plays the bad guy), with or
without the knowledge of the existence of such double personality in their
lives. Most people even make a preference of living rather in this virtual-life
other than facing themselves in the real world. In this virtual world,
everything is online: online shopping (buying and selling of goods), online ordering
and selling of food, online travel bookings and checking in etc. This new
reality has highly impersonalized us to the extent that we can now sit back at
the comfort of our homes interacting with the whole world, yet alone with our
computers. Hence the speed with which the internet/social media network
platforms gained entrance, wide spread and usage/abuse becomes understandable
because it guarantees among other things this virtual life where almost all
things are possible with “unlimited freedom,” but where information and data
could easily be manipulated or where people could be hoodwinked into swallowing
all sorts of garbage as information. It’s like the life of the Batman, who is ever
hiding behind a mask, leaving people only to their fate of guessing the real
identity of the man behind the iron mask.
Nonetheless,
let’s be fair to the internet and especially the modern social media platforms;
they have definitely pushed our generation beyond imagination. They have unmistakably
fine-tuned and polished the life we live in terms of information sourcing,
marketing, research, communication and the like. Indeed, this is certainly a plus
to our world. The quantity of media and socialization sources becomes more available
and reachable and this helps to expand the number of one's business and/or
social contacts by making connections through individuals, known and unknown. This
has, without a doubt, connected people as never before especially through the
so-called “six degrees of separation” which is the theory and now by means of
the modern social network outfits like Facebook and others, that anyone on the
planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of
acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. By this theory, anyone
who is connected to the Facebook for instance is a friend to all persons in the
Facebook network through a chain of internet based interconnectivity. Based on
this six degrees of separation concept, social media networking establishes
interconnected online communities (sometimes known as social graphs) that help
people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would
be unlikely to have met otherwise. Depending on the social media platform,
members may be able to contact any other member. In other cases, members can
contact anyone they have a connection to, and subsequently anyone that contact
has a connection to, and so on. And in that way we all are locked together in a
huge family of friends who know or do not know themselves. These are, in the
main, internet dependent platforms whereby one gains access to per computer
and/or smart-device of which a good number of people possesses. Though this kind
of practice has gone on almost as long as societies themselves have existed,
the unparalleled potential of the Web to facilitate such connections is only
now being fully recognized and exploited, through Web-based groups established
for that purpose. From them, we have gained, without doubt, and we are still
gaining.
But
having said that, it remains to be said that just as it is true with the
“uncertainty principle” of the german physicist Karl Werner Heisenberg, where
the attempt to correct the error in one side of an equilibrium increases the
error at the other side, the flip side of the good news about the internet and
the social media is enormous. It has a domino character of infinite
multiplication of itself into fantasy and make-believe, locking reality into
its dark hole of all possibilities and endless nothingness. This is a world
where every encounter becomes impersonal and people are at liberty to assume
any personality and authority at their own whims and caprices depending on what
image and propaganda they want to sell out and what aim they want to achieve.
The internet dependent social media – this collective of online communication
channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and
collaboration; websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging,
social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis have indeed
changed, not only the way we perceive/relate to ourselves and what we do, but
ultimately the way we live and basically what we are. We are now habituated to
log in to check out for news feeds/gossips which lack criteria of authenticity,
we log in to follow others and to be followed, we constantly upload our
pictures and thoughts, hoping they will receive positive comments and feed
backs for self-validation, we wait for chats to arrive to keep us out of our
loneliness because we have lacked the capacity to be alone, we mob others and
have been constantly mobbed by friends and foes, our data bank and information
account have been invaded, hacked and abused, we have been lured into errors
and plethora of negativities, we have been beguiled into websites which we
would rather not visit, we are constantly bombarded with junk blogs and
unedited materials, we constantly check and spy as well as stalk one another,
we insult one another per comments and become enemies to those we know and do
not know, indeed we dance on top of one another’s sensibility and integrity. In
point of fact, our time has been otherwise robbed of us and we approve of it.
We have been point blank redefined! In all of all this, we come out only being
sure of ourselves alone, or even no more. Here the words of Sherryl Tuckle
returns handy, where Sherryl talks about being “lost under 100 friends.” I
think Sherryl was being frugal with the number index because it should have
been “lost under a googolplex of friends.” This is a system where one could
make thousands of friends in one hour, yet one is alone and lonely as it is
technology that defines whom we are in this new regime. Sherryl’s book is subtitled in its german version “wie wir in der digitalen Welt seelisch
verkümmern.“ This loosely implies that we have
been atrophied and our humanity withered away in the digital world. This
includes our relationships, education, communication, our psyche and ideologies,
thanks to the digital Virtual Reality. This is an era where relationships are
made online and broken online, where communications begin online and end
online, where physical libraries are superfluous and everything becomes so
easy. As the quantity of our possibilities increases therefore, its quality
decreases in a typical heisenbergerian “uncertainty principle” of inability to
maintain equilibrium and control multiple variables at the random level of our existence.
And this enshrines a level of fuzziness in our humanity.
There
is this other twist to all of this and this rewinds me once more to the introductory
leitmotif of this essay. Why did I get worried after reading the conversation
between the father and his daughter which formed the set induction to this
write up? Below is a post I got from a friend that contained a chat between two
students.
1. R U coming 2 party?
2. OMG! I forgot...tmrw?
1. ;-( ??? WTF?
2. 4 U xoxox! Sorry!
1. LOL !
2. tmrw @ 10? C U there!
1. sounds good 2 me
2. Later...xoxox!
Am sure the “old school” teachers (indeed!) would be at loss these
days as it concerns the modern day style of writing and communication. Well one
will say that the essence of communication is understanding. Once the two
persons interacting understand themselves, the case is closed. No doubt about
that, but there are standards. Standards which have been established that are
universally applicable and recognizable. One needs to be acquainted with them
before one begins to cut corners. Most kids and school folks do no more know the
difference between correctly spoken nay written academic words and the social
ones. Amorphous signs and symbols are becoming common place even in serious
academic and official write-ups. An instance is an mail written by a student to
his teacher with the intention of excusing himself from the school. The student
wrote:
“Dittomatic
Dia ticha,
Ds z 2 lt u
no dt i fel sik yestd n knt mk it 2 skul 2dy. Pls du xkuz mi
frm ur 2dz lekchos az I’ll b uzin 2dy 2 vist da hosptl. I hp 2 b in skul ASAP
1nc mai helt imprvs. I gv Jeffery d asgnmt u gv us lst wk 2 sbmit 4 mi. Tenks 4
y undastndn.
Ya studnt…
De Mekino.”
I
hope you did understand the “letter?” This, by the way, was supposed to have
been a formal letter of excuse from a secondary school student to his teacher.
The problem is that one wonders with this, if the student knew actually the
correct things to write but forgot that it was supposed to be official, or that
he does not actually know how to write the words correctly or if whether it was
a shear act of insensitivity and malady. Whatever one it was, this is the
extent we have come. And this is just one example of it all. Hence the internet
and social media which are working in our favour possesses on the flip side a
dark energy which seems to be attacking our foundation and devaluing our literacy.
We have been so much seduced and excited by technology that it has begun to
take us to places that we would rather not go. All these little devices that
are so psychologically powerful have, as else said, not only changed what we do
and how we do them, but regrettably have changed who we are. People now use
these devices to text or chat away during classes, presentations, in churches,
during corporate meetings and discussions, big and small and even release
communiques filled with colloquial junks. Due from the use or abuse of these
little devices that hook us 24/7 online, parents deny each other and their
children full attention as equally children deny their parents and one another
full attention. At public and private gatherings, nobody talks to nobody, each
is head down, fingers on pad and typing away. People collide with themselves
head to head, body to body, shoulder to shoulder along the roads without even
caring as to raise up their heads to know whom they hit just to maintain the
online chatting. People have fallen into ditches and cars have crashed due from
chatting. People keep awake all daylong and all night long communing with their
virtual friends and in so doing endanger their physical as well as mental
health. Real friends gather in one place to have fun or recreate themselves,
yet each is involved with a far distant “friend” through chatting. It has
become the case that the far-away online friends seem to be all of a sudden
more valuable than the immediate face-to-face ones. This corresponds to the
observation of the renowned Magazine, “The American Psychologist”, that “…greater
use of the Internet and the [smart]
phones was associated with declines in peoples
communication with family members in the household, declines in the size
of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness.” Indeed
we have set ourselves seriously up for trouble about our capacity for
self-reflection as we are constantly growing afraid of being alone without our
small connecting devices. Whether he actually said it or not is less important
as to what is said here in the meme attributed to Mr. Albert Einstein: “I fear
the day that technology will
surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
Indeed we have hit that day, point blank, as many now carry themselves like spoiled
toddlers, getting dumber as their communication skills continue to spiral
downwards.
People
now want to customize their lives. People now hide from each other even as they
are connected. What Sherryl Tuckle calls the “Goldilocks Effect” has caught up
with us and this simply explains that friends cannot get enough of each other
only if they are far away from each other, but when close enough, they value
themselves less and shift their attention away from themselves to others far
away through chatting. This reveals an inner hollowness in our generation that
we lack the spirit of commitment and empathy and cannot engage in conversation
with ourselves anymore because everyone is afraid of his/her private space
being invaded. Sherryl Tuckle writes:
“We wanted a smart servant of our everyday lives, now they
are our masters. They should help us to save time, now they have become unparalleled
time-eaters. We wanted to program them, now they program us. When young people
in particular without restraint dive in Blogs, Chats, contact forums and online
worlds, that has a deeper psychological reason: Human relationships appear
increasingly complicated and hurtful. For this the Net offers contact without
true intimacy, communion without risk, closeness with a sufficient safety
distance. Modern man often has 100 […] friends, but not a single real friend.
Computer and Internet give us the freedom to work anywhere-in fact, we are
everywhere, lonely together.”
This attitude negates
what Aristotle called eunoia, referring to the kind and benevolent feeling of goodwill among
people which forms the basis for the ethical foundation of human life and
communion, what Cicero terms benevolentia.
This benevolentia contains in itself
attention towards others, equality, empathy, affection, reciprocity,
symmetry, true companionship. These are essential characteristics of true friendship.
But at the virtual level of connection, which is the place we have found
ourselves, these characteristics are not only ignored, they are even suppressed.
This is superficiality at its height that reveals the
weakness of the connections we think we have and value because conversations
that happen in real time are avoided. I guess that part of the problem is that
real time conversations cannot be edited as they are happening. They are
therefore avoided because they might reveal our weakness and imperfection and
render us less attractive and less powerful. Hence we shift our real time
encounter to virtual encounter where we have all the full liberty and
opportunity of editing ourselves and conversations over and over again to make
them perfect in order to sell the perfect image we have virtually created and
projected about ourselves. We prefer now to talk to one another through machine
mediated devices that offer us apparent security of our real identity. And so,
“we now expect more from technology and less from ourselves” as Tuckle would
write. Of course all of this create an illusion of companionship without the
demands of friendship because we can control the indices of virtual operations
but the dynamics of real time friendship and human relationship is outside our
control. This indeed leads to self-alienation and “sui-implosion”, a kind of belonging
to oneself alone and falling in love with inanimacy. Not only that, these media
have become also forces that impact on our economy because we now buy things we
do not need just to feel relevant. We again constantly feed these devices with
MBs and GBs to enable them steadily be hooked to the Net so as not to be cut
off. We, with money, subscribe to websites and download applications which are
irrelevant sometimes. Now these websites and apps that we visit and download,
these groups that we join, our activities and interests, the thoughts that we
randomly share, the images and pictures we post, waiting for them to be liked
or commented upon, all correlate in one another and establish this subculture
of virtual life where everything is how we want it to be from our own point of
view. This indeed is terrorism of relativism. This movement has gained a new
social system whence Pope Benedict XVI in his Message on the 43rd
World Communication Day corroborates that “the new digital technologies […] in
fact have basically changed the way and mode of our communication and in human
relationship. Friendship is now no more limited to Face-to-Face or
human-to-human interaction or as it were traditionally understood.” It exists
now at the level of “Friends-lists” so that a simple click on an online button
can unite two already known persons or total strangers into friends and
conversely, another simple click can disunite and make them again fall into the
realm of total strangers.
I once ran into
an old school mate whom I have not met for ages. On demand that we go have some
quality time and catch up with history, he immediately demanded rather for my
number, email, whatsapp, viber, BBM etc, promising to call me later. Not that
he was in a hurry or about to miss out on something, but this is unfortunately,
to a large extent who we have become. We avoid our real selves and rather meet
online. People, especially young people, spend much of their time in this online virtual space
and do not seem to
do without the look on their
Facebook accounts, twitter handles,
Whatsapp apps, BBM., to mention but these. This portrays a dependency symptom and syndrome which
suggests that the huge "consumption and
use/abuse" of these social
media networks is not only a major source of time wastage, but even harbours addictions
which can be correspondingly dangerous for the young, still unstable people who, according to
a 2004 Pew study (from Pew Research Centre, a
non-partisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C., that provides
information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends) 87
percent of teenagers have some form of Internet access, and among those
connected teens, 55 percent have created a profile on a social networking site.
They would rather text-and video chat without end which is the new social
addiction that fundamentally distracts them from their academic and school
work, making majority no more to be employable as they become superfluous in
the society due to inner emptiness. On the whole, these activities lead to atrophy of the
mind, lack of the ability to real
communication, dependency on media, severe addiction
problems, the decline of real human
interaction and poor academic performance.
EGRESS:
It
is not enough to recognize irregular patterns in the social order, more is in
demand, and that includes as a matter of high priority, how to deal with those
patterns. The neo-social order which was given birth to by the internet/social
media revolution is a complex one which has the good, the bad and the ugly
inside of it. This write up is however not dedicated to the good which is
self-evident, but to the bad and the ugly effects, which are not sometimes
obvious. The ability to weave through these sometimes interlocking merits and
demerits of the internet and call each one by its name is the beginning of our
social redemption in this direction. Without doubt, this redemption begins with
our freedom to surf in the Net and this freedom is guaranteed by our
corresponding know-how, the media/information literacy and the competence on
how to navigate positively through these labyrinth of the internet/social media
web which offers unending promises. Acquainting oneself with the necessary
technical and intellectual as well as mental proficiency and expertise to
distinguish what is for us and what is against us, the websites and social fora,
the apps and links which are to our advantage and which are to our disadvantage
is essential. Such knowledge will equip us with the mental instruments required
to be smarter than our “smart” devices. It will enable us to be responsible in
our interactions and in the projections of our identity. It will bring us up to
date with the dangers locking inside the Net/social media and how to avoid them,
making us to know exactly what we seek, how to seek for and find it, it makes
us to be weary of what we upload and what we download from the net, what we say
and how to say it because the Net never
forgets anything. It will give us the power to manipulate the net and not
to be manipulated by it. It will make us not to be slaves to the World Wide Web
but offers us back our Lordship over the info-superhighway. This media literacy
in relation to its ethics needed to be taught in schools and colleges at all
levels so as to equip the younger ones who are the primary target with the culture
of inner discipline and self-control in the use of those websites and internet
dependent apps as well as to salvage them from wanton radicalization, and all
from the clutches of miseducation. In this way, the Net and the modern communication
world becomes, as Pope Francis says, a help for people to truly and in a real
way encounter one another to encourage the unity of the human family.
Such
knowledge is necessitated by the fact that we can no more be passerby on the
digital highways. Whether we like it or not, we are connected and invariably involved
willy-nilly and these connections should grow into true encounters. We can no
more live apart, closed in ourselves, we need to love and be loved, and be true
to ourselves and to others even as we are socially connected. In this
interconnectedness which has caught up with us therefore, we need to take
charge in order to avoid being marred by what we made. Media strategies do not
ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication nor in the quality of
information we get. The world of media also has to be concerned with
humanity, it too is called to show tenderness. The digital world can be
an environment rich in humanity; a network not of wires but of people. In
this, inner discipline and basic media competence and literacy play a vital
role in returning our slipping destiny back into our hands. And when all
this is done, humanity remains the winner in the war it is waging with the
machine it created because the spider should not be caught in the very web it
weaved. Peace!
