PERSONA THEME TRENDS WELL-BEING
I
By Ayushi Madan
magine being in a living room, witnessing a family spending some time together. It’s a spacious, well lit room-sofa sets, side tables, coffee tables, rugs and throws, and all the luxurious comforts of the modern living. You would imagine they are catching up, possibly having a few drinks together, or perhaps playing a game of cards. No, they are not. You can’t hear a word, even though they are all there. Phone, earphones, tabs, laptops- everyone has their own choice of gadget, shooting down any possibility of real conversation. Does this look and feel familiar to you? Have you ever gone to a restaurant and been taken in by the urge to share some selfies on snapchat? Or mid conversation, has instagram ever lured you to take a plunge for a few seemingly brief moments (which were probably extremely long for the person waiting for you to come back to the conversation). Perhaps you were the person waiting for a friend to come back to your conversation.
NEWSCOPE
RESEARCH
ISSUES
Social Isolation in a digitally connected world!
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Volume 4 | Issue 1 | January-March 2019
Gadgets, and gadgets with wifi are the new basic needs. We just cannot do without them and we are addicted to them. Here is the proof. Detox apps on your phones, to keep you away from your phone is the new irony now-adays. The message is clear- the one who oppresses us, holds the power and means to free us, thereby still oppressing us. We are not enough for ourselves! They generally have a quintessential tree graphic, or something ‘soothing’ as its cover picture. It compels us to think about what we are buying into, as consumers, and what is the kind of world that we are constructing for ourselves. We want to access a meditative space in ourselves, using an application on our phone as the ‘environment’. We also live in an economy, where retreats are the new consumables. There are more and more retreats and workshops coming up which cater to the needs of ‘being with yourself ’ and ‘being with nature’. We are invited into ‘other worlds’, where our mundane, fast
paced, stressful, clamorous and noisy world can’t get to us. What is it that we are running away from? Two opposing, contradictory worlds are being created by us. And we want to be part of both. Oscillating between different time-scapes. I then ask you, what makes our digital media so indispensable? When did the need for our gadgets arise? What do they fulfill for us in our personal lives? For some of us, they have always been part of our lives, however, some of us have acquired the taste, and now become completely or partially dependent. They are the new normal because they make entertainment easy, they make time move faster. They make passing time easy for us, because now we are not required to engage with material inside of us, we are not required to make our real selves visible to real people outside of our phones. We can continue to portray a fragment of ourselves, choose for how long, and in what proportion we would do so. We
