Readers Write In #681: Smart Gadgets, Dumb Humans
By abishekspeare
My favorite pastime is to go down the memory lane. I do it a lot. I could reach a point in the future where most of my memories are me thinking about my memories.
And every time I erupt into a nostalgic zone of “They don’t make music like this anymore”, cursing the ‘fast food’ composers of today, YouTube has been such a diligent agent of telling me “Hey, remember this song from 15 years ago? Wanna watch it? You know what, we are watching it in 5…4…WE HERE”. It also never fails in showing me that I am, indeed, old now. Can you believe it has been SEVENTEEN years since Sivaji the Boss and Om Shanthi Om? What next, am I going to start saying stuff like “I used to travel to school in a van, you guys have it easy in your laptops, with a glorified chatbot as your teacher” to a bunch of unbothered 12 year olds?
One such nostalgic song that I stumbled upon last week was Baawre from Luck By Chance. I was a child when it released, and to me that song was the equivalent of visiting a circus, with Hrithik Roshan being the godly master of the circus. I remember being wide-eyed with not only the gleeful production of it but also being astounded by Hrithik’s water-like dancing. It was the pinnacle of human ability for me, to be able to dance like that. They would telecast it 298 times a day and I would watch it with the same wonder every time – which is what I was expecting to happen this time as well.
But Alas, I found both the production and the dance to be not as exciting this time. The water-like movements just didn’t seem water-like anymore. I started thinking if I am not finding it as astonishing as I used to, because of all the gymnastic and gravity defying choreography that movies have had recently (ex. Mahesh Babu and Sreeleela’s energetic dance in Kurchi Madathapetti, Vijay’s breathtaking dance in Ranjithame. No seriously, the man really runs out of breath in the last few seconds). I decided to watch another similar song whose choreography blew my mind when it released – Bismil from Haider – and I came out with similar results.
Have we increasingly upped our threshold for stimulation through the years so much, that things that seemed awe-inducing a few years ago are now just not exciting anymore? Has reducing attention spans, social media, and unprecedented internet expansion made us numb?
Think about it – with the Rise of the Planet of the Apps, everything has not only gotten bigger in scale and technology, but also more advanced/next level. Take glamour, for example. Everyone on screen nowadays has a perfectly toned body and a sculpted face (a lot of the actors even look similar to one another?!). It is a question of whether you have 6/8/12/24 packs. There are always exceptions of course, but majorly, the threshold of what was considered ‘an actor’s physique/looks’ has been blown out of(or deflated in?) proportion.
This is not only for cinema. Cricket for instance has improved so much in terms of data analytics and cricketer’s means to training, that we see way more sixes and runs, way more gravity defying catches, way higher strike rates.
Some of these advancements are of course fantastic to the efficiency of the artform but holistically, we have been used to so much of ‘enhancement’ that things don’t make me…feel as much anymore. I used to be startled by the action sequences of Anniyan. Now, I have seen the 21-minute single take in Extraction 2. I have seen Tom Cruise jump off the Alps by himself. Five years later, I might see the same stunt and be not as interested, because I would have seen someone pull off a jiu jitsu sequence froma rocket in the stratosphere.
We used to enjoy listening to 7-8 minute songs. Songs where the composer is in absolutely no hurry to get to the next stanza, and the singer blissfully repeats the same line four times. Songs which had one layer of sound design, no autotuning, lesser instruments, and takes a whole 30 seconds to just begin and end. Now, a 4:30 minute song is considered long, and we have multiple layers of sound designing with instruments imported from the darkest corners of the Sahara Desert.
Whether it is the root cause or a means of information exchange, social media has been the biggest reason and the centerpiece melting pot for our attention spans to go down the drain and our stimulus levels to go up the hill. If not directly contributing to this, it has played a big role in bringing everything, good or bad, to everyone.
I see a lot of people taking a break from social media and other dopamine-generating activities, and I see some of them experiencing positive results, while some of them come back. Most of my knowledge and news consumption arises from Instagram and YouTube, as do most of my distractions.
I used to finish one storybook a day, nowadays I barely cross 10 pages at a stretch before a notification draws me into my smartphone like a magnet. I get a feeling of having to open that notification and go see now the text that my friendhas sent me. Only to see that it is a forwarded message on how Ramayana took place in a Maldives beach where currently a JW Marriot is being built with the help of the Chinese Army. Ten minutes later, Zomato sweetly asks me “Are you sure you are not hungry, you haven’t spoken to metoday? Is this all I mean to you?”
Do I own my gadgets or do they own me? Food, Travel, Bollywood – the algorithm keeps creating avenues to gain my time, and I follow it like a charmed snake. The invention becomes the inventor, the inventor becomes the experiment.
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