If I were to paint a picture to an outsider as to what the human society in the 21st century is like, it would be a canvas crowded with millions of people with billions of activities per person; the activities often overlapping each other but the people all looking the other way, their backs magically turned at one another. Thoughts that leave from one person would never return to them after contemplation, what returns instead would be another thread of thought from another person. A million, billion ideas float around but none actually undergo the process of evolution. There is no conversation but everybody knows everything. Information is available in such bounty and is exchanged so quickly, so continuously that knowledge would be lost in this passivity. That which is new is not a new concept anymore, something new happens so often that novelty would be routinized. There is a scurrying search for truth but it is drowned in an ocean of irrelevance. Each of these dots that are people, while on the surface are connected to any number of the others, are engulfed in their own bubble in the core. Finally, in this vast collage, within each of these people hides the feeling of profound boredom, of apathy, and the gut wrenching fear that this feeling would never go away. In the center of it all would be a tablet or a phone or a screen of any kind representing Modern Technology.

Undeniably, what technology has done for us magnificently over centuries is that it has evolved our medium of communication. This is not a small thing. The mode of communication is a tool, powerful enough to shape the thought process of an entire community.

We can perhaps understand this phenomenon by referring to a huge on-going debate in the field of architecture about using technology to aid the design process towards a building versus drawing with your hand. This debate often revolves around the binary of producing speedy technical drawings, hence leaving more time for developing the design as opposed to designing quickly enough to be able to produce stunningly beautiful hand drawings, hence representing a poorly designed building.

What this debate fails to accommodate is the crucial idea that the representation is the design. Just like the medium of communication is the thought being communicated. If I were to draw the same building with charcoal or pencil or ink pen or a computer-aided software, the building would never look the same, chances are that the building will never be the same. Because while drawing with these media, my hand imagines the same building with a different texture, a different materiality and would inevitably end up structuring my initial idea in a different manner. A tool is not something that is independent of the idea it represents, it is an extrapolation of it and our means of communication is one such tool.

Speech, of course is the most primal and indispensable medium. It represents our ability to converse, leaving ample opportunity for open-ended, unstructured sentences that may be returned to us after being processed by another person. Already our first thought has now enriched itself simply by being heard. Then came writing and the printing press, the ability to hold a thought and not only hear it but also actually see it in front of our eyes. Our thoughts now inevitably become structured, processed, as the idea now needs to come a whole circle, it needs to be presented not as an epiphany, but as a full fledged theory. The written therefore is not merely an echo of a voice; it is another voice in itself. The medium slowly transformed from print to moving images (film), to an abundance of moving images (television) to the Internet in various screen sizes and therefore various veils.

So what about our means of communication today has made our society look like the monochrome, flat, homogeneous canvas I described earlier? It’s the screen…

Since the Internet became reasonably cheap and easily accessible, creeping into the stationary desktop, then demanding for the portable laptop, scrunched up into the mobile tablet, sneaking into the even tinier mobile-phone; we have been living behind the screens, a veil between the individual and his immediate environment.

In fact, the screen has done to the way we communicate, what the clock has done to the way we perceive time. Lewis Mumford described this beautifully in ‘Technics and Civilization’. He said:

“The clock is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences”

The screen, similarly has created a manner of communication that dissociates physical context from human interaction to the extent that it has become a wormhole that gives us access to an alternate reality, one where we have been enabled to become whoever we want to be; one that we have come to prefer over the physical reality.

Every time we post a status update on Facebook or upload a picture on instagram, or tweet, we are, in essence conversing with ourselves, showing off this internal conversation in order to be ‘liked’ by a bunch of ‘friends’ who would gladly do the needful in exchange for a few ‘likes’ of their own. We have happily erased physical context from the equation. We like being anonymous, once again negating context from the opinions we throw across this veil. Everything, right from travelling, eating, learning, earning, working, shopping and entertaining is possible from this side of the screen. Conversations too come in different levels of portability, depending on which screen size you chose! One could choose to have a real, long, meaningful conversation but who has time for more than a ‘wassup?’ when our minds are cluttered with the surge of information that is everywhere? Our mind is numbed by the presence of infinite opinions that instead of speaking out our thoughts, we are reduced to regurgitating what we briefly heard or read somewhere. Even language, something that contains its own embedded knowledge and is born out of a unique landscape, something that is essential to the oral and written modes of communication is disappearing into the abyss of the internet (Awesome, yo!).

All of this points to a general mood of boredom and therefore our infinite appetite for distractions. Why are we so afraid of boredom? Of slowness? We have been dosed over the centuries with speed and distractions that we compulsively seek them out. It is an addiction. We become jittery if we are still. Something has to be moving. We can never just sit and stare. There has to be distracting music in our ears, or other people talking to us on our screens so that not a moment is wasted in being bored. We need to amuse ourselves.

Being still and slowly working on something encodes something in our memory. It gives us time to process, to contemplate and therefore remember what we have learnt because we have figured something out in out heads. It is the same with our bodies, when our hand moves while we write or draw or play, it is learning something, giving us something to think about subconsciously. This kind of learning encodes something in our memories in a way that an individual becomes a summation of human history. This can never happen with speed. It takes time, it takes patience.

What is worrisome today is not the fact that technology is progressing; it is the fact that it is moving in a direction that has convinced us that we could do without the physical context from the get go. This, coupled with the speed of information transfer across screens, will eradicate the concept of bodily memory completely. This essentially destroys slow mediums of communication and by extension destroys entire landscapes of ‘culture’, maybe even the memory of human history!