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YOU may have recently come across a video taken in Bordeaux, France featuring a classically chic couple sipping wine outside a restaurant as a fire burned fifty yards away. Strangely hypnotic, the video managed to capture the pair’s indifference to all that was burning around them, both literally and figuratively, and, in light of how it was discovered, shared and discussed, also say something about us as a population.
For it was of course on social media I saw this video. Where else? Social media, this fire that rages constantly around us, is something you either pretend doesn’t exist or you treat it the way that French man and French woman treated the fire warming their glasses of red wine. Which is to say, you acknowledge its presence, if only to prove your own sanity, and then you look away. You carry on with your day. You seek warmth from humans instead.
That’s the idea anyway, albeit an approach easier for some than it is for others. For some, social media is every bit as pervasive and vital to their life as defecating, or scrubbing dirt from pores, or cleaning food from their teeth. It is a relationship as twisted as any other, like that of the relationship between an addict and alcohol, the role of which is to both enhance and destroy, or the relationship between divorcees whose hatred for one another has to be put to one side for the sake of their child.
In other words, once hooked, or committed, you’re stuck with it. You don’t control it; it controls you. Moreover, such is our collective acceptance and participation, social media is now normalised to such a degree we can’t remember a time when it wasn’t around; a time, that is, when we couldn’t express our every opinion or inform the world of our every
