For five hours on Monday night, the world was thrown back in time a little. Not for the first time in the past few years have we lost something which we had taken for granted. And it bothered people.
For those few hours, many of us were left staring into a social media abyss. No side effects at first, but as the evening went on, there was an edginess about people who are attached to their sites and their profiles. At first disbelief that anything like this could happen. And then, just like the beginning of lockdown, there was a novelty factor that brought a sort of relief that we might all go back to pre-social media days when life was less complicated and we didn’t know if the neighbour ran 5km or had avocados for her breakfast.
The social media platforms that remained open through those five and a half hours became the new public realm for that period of time. Twitter itself tweeted ‘Hello, virtually everyone.’ and on that platform and others, speculation grew about the future of those which had been shut down. At one stage, it was speculated that maybe, just maybe, they might never come back. As if someone somewhere had pressed a wrong button and deleted billions of photos of people’s cats, workouts, dinners and prophetic quoted messages from angels.
We heard of the smart Facebook plants where the employees were themselves locked out by the smartness and for a while, it felt like the End of Days. The absence of WhatsApp in particular hit the running of almost every household in the country. Trying to ascertain what pitch the U14s were training on and if they were this year’s U14s and not next year’s U15s would have been problematic. Who would pick them up and drop them off? Who would know if they had a game Saturday?
Perhaps because the outage which caused the shutdown of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was just for a short time, the repercussions of what happened were not too calamitous for the world at large, but the reaction nonetheless showed the extent to which we have allowed these facilities to infiltrate our lives.
Or is infiltrate too strong a word? These social media platforms did not break into our lives, we invited them in, lured by the availability of free contact with the world at large. Remember the time when each phone call had a set monetary cost. Can anybody now tell how much it costs to ring someone locally or internationally? We take it for granted that you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world. We were lured like ‘come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.’
Five and a half hours was not enough to have us rocking in the corner, but it was a brief taster of what life might be like if one day, suddenly, all of this was gone. Would the world revert to being that better place where nobody locked their homes, but spent their evenings hanging over the half door shouting pleasantries at passers-by?
No, we have come too far to go back to that. That innocence has been shattered by the requirement of instantaneous gratification for knowledge and sharing and information, no matter the quality. And the social media companies know this, having attained an unhealthy influence over all our lives and our relationships and our education and workplaces.
What is coming out of Washington this week, and what happened on Monday night are all causes for concern. The more we can do to free ourselves of our dependence on social media, the better.
