It is surprising that how this virus outbreak focuses us to maintain social distance by isolating us within a very limited periphery, but it also brought out a lot of subliminal favors that we always had, hidden deep within ourselves. According to Charles Robert Darwin, The most intellectual or strongest species may not be able to survive a changing environment but the one who can adjust itself to the changing environment has the chance of survival. While humans are the most intelligent and somewhat stronger than most of the species, it adjusted the environment in its favor instead of changing and adapting itself according to the environment. Not only is the physical supremacy that is required for humanity to survive in the changing environment but an emotionally favorable atmosphere is also required for healthy sustainability. When most of the animals remain rooted within the basic need to satisfy their livelihood, humans created psychologically and self-fulfillment needs to satisfy its multiple levels of requirements.
Being a social animal, it is difficult for us to not to go out and socialize, though the social media platforms are allowing us to be connected virtually, the lack of physical social interaction is driving out many of us crazy and Imprudent. It is funny that despite our multi-level needs, we are always bound to our basic needs like other animals with lower intellect. The moment the supplies get restricted, the basic animal instincts get stronger to satisfy the psychological needs to sustain our mortal from. What makes us different from other low intellect creatures is that our craving for the kinds of stuff that are part of our need but not required for our survival. A recent example can be laid on to support this claim when the government decided to allow the liquor shops to be reopened almost after five weeks of absolute closedown and we can witness the rush of the people to get their favorite booze. This might prove the theory that despite the risk of contamination and death, humans are capable of overcoming their fear to chase out pleasure beyond their survival requirements.
Technology makes the emotions mechanical
Once the telephone came into existence, people preferred this medium more than sending letters to their dearest one and we complained about how this invention of technology is taking a crucial part away from our lives. Radio took away some part of our recreational slots while television took most of it and now social media made most us glued to it most of the time. We keep on complaining about these technologies which might be stopping us to get along with people and involve in direct communication but we should not forget about the moments they were created to make our lives easier. Better technology does not always ensure better emotional expressions but rather helps us to create a replica of our actual emotions and “digital emojis” and “widely accepted acronyms” are living examples of the technology born emotional responses.
It’s even quite interesting how we respond to emotions in social media. There is a popular culture of using Acronyms while engaging in a conversation in social media like AMA (Ask Me Anything), NBD (No Big Deal), BRB (Be Right Back), which became quite popular among the people that they have started using them in other forms of communications as well. I can recall an incident of one my colleagues used LOL whenever she comes across to anything funny. There are numerous instances when I found the students have used these popular acronyms in writings, which made me wonder about which path the communication evolving into.
Many scholars would present sufficient evidence on which they would argue on the degradation of linguistic usage due to these popular acronyms, I still believe the popularity lies in our inherent nature of using our intellect to evolve something that will take lesser time and effort to materialize the communication. While it is debatable whether we should or should not use such abbreviated form while engaging in communication beyond social media which is considered to be a formal form of communication, many people (especially students) would love using these popular abbreviations as it saves them times and effort to spell the entire word.
Another example can be the “emojis” after it originated in Japanese mobile phones in 1997, which became another symbol of depicting emotions. It’s easier, funnier, and largely acceptable. I wouldn’t deny the usage of emojis while I could express my feeling in words on many occasions but as I said the users can certainly put forward many excuses in his defend while using emoji instead of a full sentence or at least a word for it. The increasing popularity of emojis ignited the requirement among many developers to create and send your customized emoji across different platforms through applications. Where many of them allow creating customized emojis to represent different emotional responses of the sender.
The root success factor of these inventions lies in the likelihood and acceptance among the people and over time people get comfortable in using these while engaged in communication. Most likely, in future, we would welcome such innovations in our lives to make it as easier and enjoyable as possible while considering them as an integral part of our daily communications but when it comes to the quality of the content for communication, we would always find the existence of this dilemma that will keep on reminding us of our moral duties to our existence.
Visited 1561 times, 2 Visits today
