This fortnight I trend-track and traverse Europe. I leave the US behind and go in search of the elusive and ever-changing answer as to how society has morphed post the pandemic. And the catharsis it has brought about in terms of relationships, attitude, usage, consumption habit, brand choice, spend-orientation and more.
I meet people all across and get intrusive. Something people don’t like at all anymore. People are getting more and more opaque than they were ever before.
The key question then. How opaque are you? Is every passing day making you wear masks of every kind? Peel-off facemasks that hide the real you and showcase the unreal you. Is there joy, method, truth and indeed madness in this indulgent exercise at all?
Let’s trace a wee bit of recent history of occurrences that have shattered minds and psyches. The biggest one to start with is 9/11 in the United States of America. This event of madness and craze turned a whole society that lives in the US, and everyone else in many a country around, to re-think the way they want to live. The happy fervour of the old days of saying hello to a stranger is gone today. Today, it is considered rude to look, lock gazes and leave alone stare, which is a rustic native habit for sure. If you see a fight going on in the public subway, you are meant to let it be and let it go on. You are not meant to interfere, help, and least of all even look. In a subway today, it is considered rude to lock gazes or even smile. People must not connect in public spaces even. People must engross themselves with themselves and their devices. You make a private space for yourself in the most public spaces of them all.
And there you have it. The modern subway of the day, including the ones that traverse some of our big Indian cities, has people locked into their mobile devices, listening to music through their headsets, and even just looking out at the whizzing tunnel if that needs to be done. It’s decent to be private, and completely indecent to be intrusive, even by gaze.
Society has gotten private then. It possibly started with the rude event of 9/11 and went on to get more and more an established practice with every passing small event. The pandemic topped it all. Keeping social physical distance was a mandate; the mask hid your face and the phone gobbled up your time, attention and concern for the stranger if you had any of that left. Today, if your head is down into a phone, your face is in a mask, your ears are busy with a set of iPods, you are as sensorial a human being as the dustbin or an ashtray on the train you are on.
Today, if you ask people directions in an alien place in the US or some parts of Europe, they will frown. They don’t want you coming close, they don’t want to talk to anyone, and in any case, they are busy all the time in the compulsory patches of their public-space presence with their devices and all that is going on in them.
We have gone insular then. As I check on people in the ostensibly more-developed nations of the world, I worry. Man has fallen on tough times. Man does not want to connect to man. The definition of whom I want to connect to is made by a complete personal plan and choice. Strangers are not welcome here. And everyone apart from my circle of I, me, myself, my family of 3 and a select set of physical friends, is a stranger. When I want more, I have social media to be of help. My virtual friends live here. I have 600 of them on Facebook, and possibly 6000 followers on Twitter and an equal number on Instagram. I will get virtual here.
What’s ahead seems even more promising to this socially divorced generation of people. The metaverse is ahead. I can be who I want to be out here, with an avatar all my own. And this avatar (and not I) will interact with another avatar out there that belongs to someone else playing the same charade. The new society is all about wearing even more masks, creating even more fiction about the fact that just do not exist anymore. I am not I anymore. I am who I want to pretend to be. Vicarious living is the norm, and the metaverse is the ultimate locale that will afford all of this to me.
A lot has happened over the pandemic then. As I continue to explore more, I will rest the case here for now with a piece of data related to India. When television first came to India, community viewing was the norm in rural India. The average viewership per set was an unbelievable 72. It was a veritable ‘mela’. As more and more folk got a television set of their own, community viewing shrunk. In 1984, the number was still a robust 18 per set. It has shrunk to seven today in the villages of India. It will shrink to five when every family has a TV set. It will shrink to two when every home will have 2 television sets. It will then shrink to one when every mobile handset in the house has a television viewer glued to it alone.
The smallest unit of society is the individual. Sadly, society is fast shrinking into it. The individual is the new society.
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults