Motsuthung Yanthan
Kohima
Dictators of the past were human beings born fierce and brutal. They were seeing, they could be felt and they could bleed. They made no bones about who they were in front of the people around them. And traditionally, they were individuals that ruled the society- their words counted as if they were divine, their actions justified by belief or fear, and practices upheld by authority. However, values and practices evolved and the cruel and unjust system of dictatorship was eradicated from this world.
Or so we think.
The little gadgets called smartphones that we hold with us, like it is part of our body with biological significance, is what I call a dictator. And for the new generation, there is no denying. A dictator dictates. In the past he had to say, “Power flows from the barrel of the gun”, and people obliged. Now it just ‘beeps’ and we oblige. It looks like a free will, unlike the past. But sadly, it only looks like a free will.
The world is changing at an unprecedented pace. It took the entire span of history of the world for us to invent the first aircraft in 1903- the Wright brothers on humanity’s behalf. And in the next 66 years alone, humans had made a footprint on the delegate, fine soil of the Moon 4 lac kilometers away from Earth.
Change is inevitable and inherent. Like they say “Change is the only permanent thing in this world”. So I don’t denounce our dependence on smartphones. It’s a necessity; it’s a tool to facilitate most of our needs. But can one just stop everything for a second and think of how it rules us in all ways a dictator can?
A recent research in the US found that on the average, people tapped, swiped and clicked their smartphones for a whopping 2,617 times each day. If the involuntary movement of the muscle to check an object so religiously just with the sound of a little tone, is not a terrifying change then what is?
Not all changes are harmful. But be wary of the change that transforms our behavior in a pace our body and mind cannot cope. Nobody asked anybody to renounce this change that we have already embraced. But just stop for a moment and ask to yourself: Am I being dictated?
