Painted on Silver Dress
We, two women, were in the lift at eight in the morning still dishevelled, still cradling our coffee when a girl walked in wearing a silver dress that looked painted on, arched eyebrows of an interesting shade of amber, filled in with more silver and a face where so much contouring, and colouring, and shaping, had gone on that I couldn’t recognise it as human.
While I looked (okay, stared), the other woman asked: “Oh my, where are you going this morning dressed like that?” “I’m a blogger” the silver trussed up girl said as if that explained everything.
This girl had been up before us, clearly applying the gobbledygook on her face, the lashes, the many shades of eye colour. She had absolutely no interest in us. She was getting ready for the iPhone. The ‘likes’ on Instagram or Facebook from strangers who didn’t care about her, whom she could make envious, who were just as addicted as her, was her own hit if you want to call it that.
We’ve all had versions of this. That dress that we know looked good on us, the photo that made us look ten years younger, the comments, the likes. For a few minutes, you feel like somebody, like you are not alone in the world, like you don’t know that only a handful of people support you when you end up in the doctor’s office or have a night fright or a flat tyre. But if you dig deeper into the Internet you know it’s a rabbit hole.
It’s a quick hit in return for a hit and people move on. There will always be someone much more interesting than you.
As of June 2018, 55.1 per cent of the world’s population has Internet access. You’re looking at a phenomenal figure of about three and a half billion people online. People switch on Facebook and ‘go live’. They report incidents from the scene like on-the-spot reporters.
Like cameramen, once did, they use their phones to create videos. Like graphic artists, they create montages and collages. They send it to the world wide web. This social media explosion is as mind-blowing, terrible, and corrosive. We get to watch people doing terrible things to themselves and other people and people climbing mountains and in the depth of rescue operations.
We have recordings of people from 911. When it’s good, it’s great. Mostly, it’s corrosive. A gulper of time. Trinis have embraced social media wholeheartedly.
Reposting ideas and aphorisms have become an instant way of describing ourselves, of expressing passive-aggressive rage, calling for help, looking for love or showing our piety, and yes, bullying.
It’s about losing the ability to think in words, to express ourselves in words, to respond in words (hence, memes).
Despite thousands of collective ranting hours clocked in on social media, change has been slow. We are still hostage to drug and gun gangs, still have among the highest rate of crime worldwide. Our institutions are still rotting. Our jails still overflowing. Our dumps still not landfills. Our courts still have cases pending for years. Our streets still littered.
In the midst, of this comes the news that promoters have added 45 new fetes to the annual 200 in the lead-up to Carnival.
Combine the productive hours lost in the rabbit hole of the Internet with the noise of the fetes. KFC like consumerism. No investment.
No return. Corrosion of the body.
Lottery like spending. Waste.
There is going to be a super group of people ruling the world. They will not be the bloggers. They will be the children of the people who are denied junk time (like people who invest in social media for instance).
While the rest of the world tweets and Instagrams and snap chats in a vocabulary that is not just shrinking but shrivelled, the new elite spend their quiet time acquiring the ability to think critically, do complex manipulative consumer charts. Scarily, we will return to the circular place where democracy only works for a few.