Babajide Henry Adeyefa | Klo4

Whose idea of fun was this?
It all started, as always, with the adverts. Then the mandatory arguments. The talking heads called it groundbreaking, another blow struck for instant communication, world flattening, yadayada. Conservatives advised caution, and then were labelled Neanderthals. Eventually we all accepted it. So the new dimension of social media moved in with us… We became a walking heap of instantly communicated emotions- the last frontier of privacy was breached with nothing more than a sign-in ID and a password. Naked and ashamed.

The need to communicate, to be heard instantly, understood constantly, was ascribed to us, and we accepted it, without question. The question “where was this need over the decades?” was never asked. “How on earth did the cavemen ever survive with just face to face communication?!” (Maybe that’s why they were cavemen!) In the race to the future, no questions were asked. THE FACE became reality: a 24 hour real time update- “as you think it, let the world see it”. We laughed when we saw that Slogan. Dayo swore to break himself if it ever took (Dayo’s always swearing to do that anyway, so we just agreed that both this new fad and our good friend were equally ridiculous).

Poetic spirits of the last millennium would write “solitude is my prison”. Right now, you wish! An outside observer would have seen our threshold for embarrassment increasing, our “shockability” dropping. I knew, but I needed it too. It was important to me, to see what they were thinking and ridicule it, and hold myself as a much loftier thinker with deep thoughts only fellow sages could comprehend. To scoff at the majority of posts on FACE (yes, we still call them posts) and say things like “this is an indictment of the value of all human erudition” –  sounds nice, doesn’t it?

We know it will continue. We know it will eventually kill huge parts of us. But in some masochistic –Darwinian-logical way, we have all made the decision. Maybe whatever it kills never deserved to survive anyway.

Sent (of course) from my iPad.