The Covid pandemic is a disease of its time. For a world which was already becoming more individualistic, here was a virus that made us more isolated. This isolation was driven not by choice but by a fear of others. The pandemic and its consequences made us confront a new phenomenon about the way our society is evolving, particularly on the changing nature of how we relate to other people.
Years pass away like people do. They are there at one moment and then not there the next. But this year did not just pass away. It stayed on and on. For a long period, it was the same day, day after day. We began to recognise the habitual acts that describe our everyday life. Habits, like breathing, are such that we are rarely conscious of them. 2020 was the year in which habits came to the foreground, in which we had to confront our daily habits every day.
In this year, particularly from March, our lives underwent many changes. People travelled much less. Many worked from home and countless others suffered because their work did not allow them this luxury. Across the country, in urban and rural areas, people saw less of others than they had ever done before. They did not visit the homes of relatives and friends as they used to do earlier. The crowds in public spaces, restaurants, places of worship, festivals and sporting events just vanished.
We had lots more time to spend by ourselves, within ourselves. For some, if not many, it was a kind of rediscovery of who we are as individuals. But more importantly, it was also a discovery of how little other people matter to our lives. Not only did people not meet others but they spoke and interacted much less with others. It was not that we were more lonely but only that we discovered new forms of being alone.
Society was already changing before the pandemic struck. Social processes were becoming more centred towards the individual. Swiggy changed the basic social act of eating with others. Instead of sharing common spaces and interacting with the people in hotels and restaurants, Swiggy made it possible to eat on demand, eat by ourselves and where and when we wanted.
Personal technologies had changed our social interactions. Children spent more time lost inside their phones, tabs and the internet. Not only did they spend little time talking to their family but they also had less face-to-face interactions with their friends. Friendship was mediated through Facebook and other creations of a digital media.
All these changes were magnified by our response to the pandemic. They were legitimised by the changing practices during this period. After 2020, it would not be a surprise if online transacting and interacting with others becomes a new habit of the individual as well as of the larger society.
Many find it easier to relate to people through this digital world. This is not surprising since it is indeed difficult interacting with people in person. It is much easier to engage with others through Skype and Zoom. You don’t have to listen to everything they say. You can watch something else while they are talking, read emails or listen to music -- practices that many schoolchildren excelled in during online classes! Emotion gets dispersed and dissipated in the online medium compared to face-to-face interaction.
The online medium became the de facto society for those who could afford it. This was not just an urban phenomenon. People across the country tuned into YouTube and other digital platforms for entertainment as well as for learning cooking, music and everything else. The internet also served as a de facto hospital for them as they learnt more about the coronavirus than even some doctors. But this learning was impersonal because the internet functions as an impersonal society, one which replaced the physical structures of social practices and social behaviour.
The idea of presence lost quite a bit of its value
Being Present
These practices that have defined the year 2020 raise many important philosophical questions. One of the most important is the meaning of being physically present. What does physical presence add to an event? Is physical presence even necessary in a world dictated by increasing online activities? We are now in ‘touch’ with our family, our teachers, our doctors and almost everybody else through the online medium. What do we lose if we don’t meet them physically at all?
This is not a new philosophical question. The difference between imagination and reality has always had to engage with the difference between presence and absence. It has also been an extremely important problem in art. Theatre is different from films in that there is a physical presence of the actors in front of the audience. Is there a difference in watching the actors in front of us and watching a film of that play?
Many artists in the performing arts believe that what makes their performance special is their ‘presence’ on the stage. In this year of the pandemic, the idea of presence lost quite a bit of its value and has been overshadowed by the Zoom phenomenon. If what has happened this year is a clue, then what I glimpse for the future is a human civilisation which will replace most, if not all, physical interactions with digital interactions. Pandemics will only be another excuse to make this change complete.
Consequence
There is a consequence to this disembodied engagement with others, when we mortgage the physical body to the online world. In so doing, we become insensitive to the multidimensionality of others since we only experience others through technology. The person we see on Skype or Zoom is not a physical person but only an image that is mediated by that technology. This is not an experience of the other but only a technological experience of the other. Such experiences have a tendency to make one insensitive to the suffering of others since suffering is a shared feeling.
The shift to this online existence will only increase the disparity in society. It is not an accident that this was also the year in which the poor became more poorer and the global economy pushed tens of millions into dire poverty. The online world is rich in information and we come to know so many things which is not otherwise possible. But human relationships are not about information alone. They need the element of being with each other and that comes only through physical presence.
A culture based on absence, as in the online world, is politically dangerous. Teaching online is a practice that is based on absence and this has had disastrous consequences for poor children. The online world is a distant world, controlled by powers we don’t see. They are hidden and unaccountable. The greatest danger of this is when governments become an online entity. They govern through this medium, they remain hidden and there is nobody ‘physical’ that we can hold accountable.
(Sundar Sarukkai is the Founder of Barefoot Philosophers, an initiative to take philosophy to children and the public)