This is the year I turn 30. Being born in 1988 puts me firmly on the tail end of the millennial spectrum, given the oldest millennials were born in 1982, six years before me.
In many ways, I am quite the quintessential millennial — what the young ‘uns in the know would call “basic”. I can be narcissistic, I enjoy avocados and I’m fond of documenting most aspects of my life.
Ordering a cool dessert at a restaurant? You can be sure I will have my phone camera ready — better yet if the dish sizzles or has dry ice for the smoke effect. Holiday sunsets are captured by the dozen because they pull in the likes on Instagram. My contribution to my family WhatsApp chat is mainly dog videos, as well as snaps of random cute puppies I see on the street.
In many ways, technology is part and parcel of my life and I admit to being guilty of the occasional information overshare on social media. But in recent months, three separate incidents have got me thinking about how much technology has begun to impact our psyche and our response to what is going on around us.
The first happened early last November, when a young Chinese man, We Yongning, fell to his death from the top of the Huayuan Centre, a building more than 60 storeys high in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. He was an online celebrity of sorts — known for his high-altitude stunts — and had thousands of followers on the Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. That fateful day, he had gone to the rooftop of the skyscraper to take videos of his stunts — footage recovered showed him doing pull-ups on the edge of the building — which he hoped would go viral when he posted them online.
The second incident happened on New Year’s Eve last year, when hugely popular American YouTube personality Logan Paul decided to post a video on his channel, showing him happening upon an apparent suicide victim while visiting the notorious Aokigahara forest in Japan, otherwise known as the suicide forest.
The video, which showed the 22-year-old reacting disrespectfully — at one point even joking and laughing — when he found the victim, racked up hundreds of thousands of views from his 15 million subscribers before he took it down one day later. Despite YouTube’s policies prohibiting violent or gory content, the video quickly went viral on the site, reaching No 10 on its trending list, evoking strong protests from viewers on YouTube and other social media platforms.
The last incident occurred last week. Waiting at a bus stop on my way home, I saw a group of schoolboys across the street running in the rain to take shelter at a HDB void deck. Laughing as they ran, the group of four was 20m from the shelter when one of them slipped and fell.
His friends stopped for a moment to take stock of their pal, who lay on the ground looking bewildered. Then, instead of helping him up, they ran the remainder of the way to the shelter, whipped out their phones and laughed uproariously while recording their friend peeling himself off the soaked pavement.
All three incidents were deeply upsetting to me, but in decidedly different ways. In one, a young life was lost. In the other, a lost life was mocked. In the last, mockery took the place of friendship and basic human decency.
All these issues are vividly different — in their circumstances, magnitude and ramifications. But at their core, they are, to me, the same. In each, there is the relentless pursuit of 15 minutes of online fame, driving people to do more and more extreme things to entertain their audiences.
There is the desire to document every aspect of our lives, so much so that we might inadvertently throw our morals out the door as a result. Then, there is the increasingly grey line between what we consider entertainment and what is sheer public humiliation and voyeurism.
Each of these instances made me realise that we live in a time when many people’s first reaction to human tragedy is not to help or intervene, but to reach for their phones. In a way, we are so removed that we would rather record life than confront it directly.
We upload everything. We watch everything. We become documentarians and, then, we all become voyeurs. In the case of Paul, YouTube cut off its monetisation ties with him after the huge public backlash. But truth be told, that is unlikely to have any long-term ramifications for him, given his cult-like following of millions of impressionable young teenagers and pre-teens.
As someone who admittedly uses a lot of social media, both for social and professional reasons, watching videos and sharing information will not be something I will stop doing. But even as we continue to record and share our lives, there is a broader culture of detachment that needs to be confronted, and soon.
Parents of young children, monitor who your child is looking up to as an online hero. Have that conversation about what is right, what is wrong and when they should put down their phone and reach out a helping hand instead.
For the rest of us — millennial or otherwise — there is a need to be much more conscious and conscientious about what we post and share online. It is easy to press a button and show your life to the world. This year, perhaps, everyone should take a step back and consider whether in doing so, they are affecting anyone else in the process.
We live in an online world and it is easy to become perpetually dissatisfied, easily bored and emotionally detached. Our senses now need so much more to be entertained. But it is not okay to let yourself get desensitised to things that are wrong.
There are certain lines that we would not cross in our offline lives. Let us not cross them in our online lives too.
The Strait Times/ANN