Commoners as Barbarians

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

Now a days anyone with an opinion and a mobile or internet connection can automatically express, share and voice opinions (all most all of them unsolicited) online.  Online platforms allow for immediate access to a fairly wide spectrum of audience, who intern also have a great deal of variety opinions.  All most of these opinions are unsolicited, and often absurd and unintelligible.  It is not to disagree with every opinion counts, but the WWW has made irrelevance a common thing.  Your friends (and family if they care), their friends, and their friends and essentially everyone else on the planet (for those who use www.linkedin.com have the experience of million of connected people to you though it could be nth factor on how they are connected) who have access to the internet can see, forward, comment and also use some kind of emoticon to add graphical expressionism to the commentary.  Only the WWW knows where something begins and where something ends.  There is equal space for the good, the bad and the ugly, and add a huge dose of unreal.

With the WWW, freedom of expression has been given a new meaning.  Let us not forget the radical extremism which has been a key talking point in the 2016 USA presidential elections.  As the WWW reach expands exponentially, so is the use (abuse) of the internet as a medium to reach people.  Let us not forget the advent of selfie. Troll and live stream.  The communications that are supposed to connect the world has all of a sudden become a medium to really express radical (whatever that word means) thoughts.

Absurd and abusive trolling is common place.  There is no escape to anyone.  Hacking anyone and anything that’s on the internet and leaking information has become common place.  There is demand for trash and more trash, and WWW is a grand platform for simply trashing everyone and everything.  The business that use the net for customer care and ease, is a place for fear and exploitation for hackers, who steal and steal from banks, companies and stores and whatever that can access (which has become easier than normal) and even the government and election systems are all of a sudden hacked and exploited.  All this while the hackers stay anonymous and keep demanding money from everyone, and passing threats out to everyone.  The famous WiKi leaks are a great example of WWW exploiting everything in the world.  There is no rime or reason, simply hack and hack until someone is abused.  In reality accessing information without permission is simply cheating and exploitation.  Only the internet is giving them a new term; hack.

There is no longer polite conversation; respectful addressing of each other and understandable narrative that was common place with communications.  Even with letters and telephone there was a sense of respect in addressing one another, which the internet has completely erased.

The world has all of a sudden has become empowered with the internet and an expert on trash talk and abbreviated (also unintelligible) but exaggerated abuse.  The impoliteness and expertise is directed at the www, thus at everyone on it.  You really don’t know the person, have never met the person nor spoken to the person, but you freely comment, degrade and abuse, and a lot of times express expert opinion on something totally foreign and irrelevant.

The individual opinions have become so absurd, that as if the rest of the world is getting it wrong (on everything), and personal biases have become expert commentary.  The audience is so broad on the internet, and the audacious comments do get a like or two, and all of a sudden become a talking point, and all of a sudden the chat boxes become infinite loops.

The impunity and ignorance that is constantly expressed with quick strokes on the computer feeding the internet really has become atrocious.  It is probably time for filters to every social media to distance and disrupt the antagonism and absurdity of what is being thrown out there.