When human intellect lays down arms to social media

Today is a friend’s birthday. I remembered. I called. Facebook did not remind me. Nor did the What’s App group we are on. I congratulated myself on my memory and thanked God that my memory had not become subservient to social media yet. Yes! I could still remember a few things from my childhood.

Facebook has become all-pervading now. It has penetrated our celebrations, get-togethers, picnics, vacations, weddings, everything! Facebook reminds us of our best friend’s birthday! We might have forgotten to wish our mother on her birthday if Facebook had not reminded us. Facebook re-creates our memories. Had Facebook not reminded us that we had gone for a vacation to Timbuktoo “4 years ago”, we just might have forgotten it. Facebook reminds us and we relive those moments. We share the same pics again. Some friends comment, “Oh My! Your baby looked so cute”, “Oh My! You still look the same, you haven’t aged at all”……. We get 200+ likes on this memory and our happiness quotient goes up a notch, or maybe even 10 notches.

Well, it’s a blessing that social media is a country of only happy citizens. It does not store any of the melancholy moments, poignant phases or turbulent times of our life. Imagine if Facebook were to prompt a crying or fighting face with the caption “huge fight with mother in law”, “Wife is the curse of my life” and ask us to share the memories of “4 years ago”! That would be awful, right? Thankfully remembering the bad and sad days of our life is not prompted by social media.

I remember an anecdote from the life of Albert Einstein. Someone had asked Einstein his phone number. He reached out for the telephone directory. “You do not even know your own number”, asked the person. Einstein replied, “Never memorise something that you can look up”. I fear our generation has taken this a little too seriously. Memorizing poetry is considered unfashionable. Knowing the periodic table or the binomial theorem at the age of 30 raises eyebrows as though one is a wierdo. Since the advent of the mobile phone we have stopped memorizing phone numbers. We have stopped bothering to remember our meetings and appointments since the smart phone is there to pop a reminder. We have un-remembered birthdays of near and dear ones, happy times spent with our loved ones, beautiful days of the past, because…. well social media is there to remind us.

I wonder if we have traded our intelligence to technology, if we have surrendered our memory to technology, if we have allowed our humanity to bow to technology. Cannot help quoting Albert Einstein again- I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

God! Let us not bring such a day on ourselves!