Daily Times

The amazingly easy access to knowledge has changed the whole culture of the world.

Our world has changed enormously. Until the late 1960s, the internet was unknown to the world. The people generally became aware of the internet in the mid of 1989. Since then, it has changed our lives immeasurably; providing the information that we once used to gather by sulking in libraries for days and weeks on end. Prior to the internet, access to knowledge was only possible through books and print media. Now, access to knowledge is possible with the touch of a finger on the computer.

The terms “social media” and “creativity” are often confused and misleading. So, it is instructive to know what we mean by them. “Social media” has been defined as “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.”

It includes a wide range of digital marketing tools and programs that can be used to socially interact with the audience. This could be anything from a website to an app, a blog or a YouTube video.

“Creativity” has been defined in the dictionary as “the ability to transcend ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, and imagination are the tools of creative ability.”

Our modern dilemma is that we are faced with an enormous explosion of knowledge, which humbles our capacities to absorb it. This amazingly easy access to knowledge has changed the whole culture of the world to a degree that we are tempted to ask: “Is this surfeit of knowledge, a boom or a curse?”

Yet, it is usually at the cost of personal relationships, interactions and exchange of views with our intimate friends and relations

Admittedly, in our traditional acquisition of knowledge, prior to the internet, our system was stuck in the past. It was immutable and based on recall learning. In the post-internet world, however, we continuously question authority and are driven by adaptation to change, which has become inevitable in everything we do. Prior to the internet, there was no tradition of questioning others’ views on the world.

Today, social media has facilitated us to access so much information, which was impossible to gather using conventional methods. Now, there are new ways of sharing information digitally: through texts, images and sounds, which provide greater and quicker stimulus to learning.

The internet is unfortunately plagued by certain tendencies, which outweigh most of its benefits. A major trend is blogging, which is an entry or a post put on a website. This has become a mania on the internet. This “wisdom of the crowd” is visible on editor-free sites, which serve our most banal interests. The traditional mainstream media has been replaced by a personalised one. This user-generated social networking works more like self-advertisement. In this era of exploding technologies, it appears that there is no truth except the truth that you create for yourself. It stifles creativity and also leads to the theft of intellectual property. When advertisements and public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred, which consequently obscures objectivity and creates a cult of the amateur. The sources of this dubious content on the internet are mostly anonymous because their contributors rarely reveal their identity. There are no guarantees that the content supplied on the internet has been checked or verified by any authority. Thus, a culture of cutting and pasting has emerged on the internet, which has created a generation of kleptomaniacs.

Today’s internet gives rise to amateurism rather than expertise. Now, Encyclopedia Britannica, compiled by 4,000 experts and professionals of all fields, is being replaced by Wikipedia, which is composed by amateurs. In this never ending stream of unfiltered user-generated content, we have no one to vouch for the reliability or credibility of the content. The internet encourages false identities, and most of its contributors remain anonymous.

The most appalling feature of the internet is its easier access to sexually explicit content. More than two billion porn websites attract more visitors each month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined. Nearly 88 per cent of this porn contains violence against women, which has extremely devastating effects on our youth.

There are numerous other side effects of the internet. Despite being such a boom, it also robs a lot of time and energy of people. This time could be used for many positive social engagements and creative pursuits of far-reaching benefits.

Maybe one feels mentally and emotionally invigorated by the content received and experienced in this virtual world.

Yet, it is usually at the cost of personal relationships, interactions and exchange of views with our intimate friends and relations. In this physical, three-dimensional world, we are free to use our brains and bodies and not miss out on the bounties that the internet has thrown at our threshold. But we must also try balancing internet time with other activities and priorities.

Excess of anything is bad. Limiting the usage is in our hands. We must understand the internet is only a window to the world; an instrument giving us easy access to knowledge and showing us a vast realm of possibilities, which we were previously unaware of.

Aimlessly peeping through this window, only to kill time, indicates depravity, which makes one addict to idle living or becoming an outcast in his own environment. There is no other activity, which leads to so much wastage of precious time in this highly competitive world. There is, thus, no blame on the internet if it is indiscriminately put to misuse. The internet is only a vehicle, not a cause.

There are numerous YouTube channels to cater to your creative faculties by finding the answers you have always needed to know. With the rise of the internet, it has become quite easier to learn any skill you desire by highly experienced persons of that field.

In some ways, I think the internet has made it harder to become creative because it encourages us to be interested in all the wrong things. While there are tools and apps that are extremely useful in one’s creative development, others like Facebook and Twitter have little creative value. They only lull folks to slip into a comfortable life.

With all the time spent on Facebook and Twitter, one could busy oneself in reading, writing, or nurturing one’s creative faculties.

Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (like an invention, a literary work, or a painting).

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. It is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Creativity involves three key elements: absorption, reflection and inspiration. The modern trends on the internet do not seem to help cultivate these connections.

The muse (the mythological goddess who inspires creativity) is seemingly outside the scope of the internet and the banal interests it caters to. I cannot resist quoting the following passage which succinctly puts this idea across:

“The Muse is a delicate flower, a fickle Goddess. She must be treated with respect and dignity. She must be nurtured, given the proper nutrients: water, sunlight, fertiliser, a touch of love. If properly taken care of, she will reward you with great things: a bountiful garden of words, a cornucopia of ideas.”

The writer is a former member of the Provincial Civil Service, and an author of Moments in Silence