Sudhirendar Sharma
I’m no longer worried because I know many others feel the way I do and that is: the present-day gadget-friendly generation has run out of emotional mechanism they were born with! Else, why would bland text, passive status and predictive smiley become the unpromising greetings on festive occasions? And, why would conscious expression of thought give space to copied text and downloaded visuals? Need it be said that the realm of digital communication has unleashed a world of electronic emotions around us.
I’m as disturbed as novelist Ayn Rand would have been, and the one who had long considered ’emotions as product of man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly’. Since lot goes into making of human emotions, I try not to acknowledge such text messages, bulk greetings and electronic cards. For me, the cut and paste emotions that are re-invented and amplified are worthy of quick deletion! But much to my discomfort, such passive electronic emotions continue to fill-up my virtual space.
As touch-screen technology moves center stage as a mode of communication, the business of saying things face-to-face is seemingly on its way out. Mediated by communication technologies, emotions too have become packaged products which can be clicked and picked online. As these are produced so are these consumed, a perfect reminder that we live in a ‘read and delete’ society. That electronic emotions lack the ability to communicate the details of an emotional response isn’t a majority concern.
Curiously, it is the accumulation of ‘negative emotions’ that should be a matter of concern. While ‘positive emotions’ exit through the electronic route, ‘negative emotions’ fail to escape human psyche. No wonder, pent-up emotions and hidden aggression increasingly confront us as a society. Be it unprovoked firing in a Connecticut school or brutal gang-rape in a Delhi bus, the ‘negative emotions’ are finding a violent escape route. The trouble is that unlike electronic emotions these cannot be easily deleted!
