Connection and Conflict
With the internet, we also welcomed a new era of globalized communication that reflected the world each individual walked from, creating a steaming brew of cross-cultural ideas, shared collaboration, and multifaceted perspectives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists from China, Germany, India, and the United States among many others collaborated using the internet, accelerating vaccine development manyfold. This freedom gifted by the internet, however, came at the cost of losing our cultural identities in the infinite exposure provided by the internet. For instance, younger generations in Japan and Korea once preferred Western clothing over their traditional Kimono and Hanbok, however, the internet has turned the tides by making traditional wear more fashionable, blending the modern with the millenia-old among the youth through digital marketing.
Freedom and Fear
Talking about Westernization, it is no secret that the cultural ideals of the US have predominantly shaped the global internet today, instilling values of freedom of speech and the free flow of information. However, freedom often invites chaos, and the way countries deal with the digital dragons of chaos reflects their psycho-social structures. We have Finland - a feminine, thus egalitarian country- declaring the internet as a basic human right. Juxtaposing it stands China, maintaining its Great Firewall to isolate itself from the rest of the world, enforcing its masculine and hierarchical Confucian values of social harmony over individual freedom on the internet. However, it’s not that black and white. Even within the West, the US and European Union often clash over user privacy. While the US holds the authority to monitor global internet communication via the Patriot Act to ensure collective security, the European Union forbids it under its GDPR guidelines for securing individual privacy. Contrasting and clashing, these rival philosophies create the internet ethos that empowers and endangers individuals who live within them.
Opportunity and Oppression
Another contrast found in this chaotic cyber-soup of cultures is, paradoxically, the absence of some. Despite promising freedom, the egalitarian sails of the internet are themselves at the mercy of the worrisome winds of politics, education, economics, and social norms. Take Sub-Saharan Africa which has one of the world's lowest internet users, in contrast to 85% of Kenyans who embrace internet use, infact, its capital Nairobi has famously been referred as “Silicon Savannah.” One of the reasons for this disparity can be the strong acceptance of unequal and rigidly hierarchical power distribution -characteristic of high power-distance - in Sub-Saharan Africa which often leads to poorer decision-making. Kenya, however, developed a decentralized low power-distance approach allowing grass-roots innovations like M-pesa to thrive. India, however, faces a stark gender disparity: only about 30% of Indian women have internet access compared to 60% of men limiting women's opportunities to education and economic opportunities. This reflects not only India's but South Asia's gender inequality - though the gender disparity fades as we glance further East over China, Japan, and South Korea. And the Other Korea? It's as oblivious to the internet's potential as we are to internet privacy.
Conclusion
Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, critiques our times as the age of advertisement and publicity, not of action and potential – a critique resonating even more sharply in our age of constant online self-promotion through social media. Wherein infinite information satiates our passion into passivity, where everything insignificant, from celebrity gossip, click-bait content to ignorant opinions, turn into insurmountable, and incessant idle chatter, wherein people speak a sea of words without saying anything of sense and substance. The waxing and waning waves of the internet echo the depths of our collective consciousness, resembling our deeply human struggles between connection and conflict, freedom and fear, and opportunity and oppression. Based on our backgrounds, the internet maroons us between these islands of clashing and challenging ideologies. But perhaps, the true challenge lies in negating the noise -- of having the freedom of thinking and finding knowledge truly meaningful to us in the face of infinite information fighting for our attention.
Ejaz Shaikh
