I have already spoken here about the contemporary failing of a part of humanity that is lost in social media. I spoke about it more than five years ago.
Since then, I have taken the subway again. Every business day that God makes – and I am surprisingly delighted. What I am less delighted about is to note that each subway that I take, whether at 9 am, 4 pm or 8 pm, is filled with people glued to their phones.
I first wondered if the time offered by public transportation allowed us to manage what we did not have time to do at home or at work, since our world is now dematerialized, and we are all overwhelmed with emails and notifications from the various apps or entities that handle the various aspects of our daily lives.
But I quickly realized that the majority – if not almost all – of the screens I glimpsed presented the short videos typically offered by social media. The screen is invariably vertical and the thumb gesture is typically that of scrolling through content.
An inner void naturally leads us to social media, where a clever mix of information, entertainment and dream life is available.
What do we get from it? Nothing in general, except an even more abysmal inner void.
We have all experienced it: whether comfortably installed on a sofa or swung by the rocking of a train, everyone has already opened for a few minutes the “reels” of Instagram, the “shorts” of YouTube, X (which everyone calls Twitter) or TikTok only to realize that an hour of life has been lost or that we missed our subway stop.
The truth is that all these videos are short because they adapt to a shortening of the attention span and a progressive lowering of the general level of education. The popularization of information is good – because it allows complex information to be made accessible to everyone – but it is almost impossible to properly popularize a subject in 60 or 90 seconds, when it is not fake news that spreads at the speed of light. Furthermore, let’s be honest, the vast majority of these short videos are not intended to educate but to entertain.
The truth is also that the notion of boredom seems to be no longer valid. In a society where hyper-performativity is the golden standard, one must be busy with something every minute. This is a shame because boredom allows to take a mental break and access imagination, as I have already said here.
Well, let’s get some air.
Alexander McQueen cape – Chanel twinset – Khaite trousers – Gucci handbag
February 7, 2025
