WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION

O be an artist is to be alone; there is no escape from it.

- C P SURENDRAN

The basis of art is self-confrontation and its existential environment is solitude. Yet, how difficult a proposition this is in our time when every distraction offers an escape from ourselves? This is not a rhetorical question. As a species, we have never been more ‘outed’ from ourselves than now. Outed in the sense that we panic at the prospect of an inner life.

TS Eliot spoke of being “distracted from distraction by distraction”. In our continuous state of diversion, we failed to notice the day the ‘carbon edition’ of the behavioural gene began its end: February 4, 2004, the day Facebook came into existence for the Harvard community.

Mark Zuckerberg waited another two years before releasing it to the world, facilitating a mutation of that behavioural gene from carbon to silicon. We are no longer the humans we once were. No one has changed mass psychology more since Sigmund Freud than Zuckerberg.

The mobile phone is a weapon of mass distraction. And each person has one. But it is more than that. Social media has birthed a fourth basic drive to rival hunger, sex and power: fame.

One reason we rarely see unappealing faces in media profile pictures is that fame is more easily achieved when the person behind the screen is beautiful. This persists despite recent historical efforts by liberals to institutionalise fairness regardless of colour, race, weight or gender.