“On or about December 1910, human character changed,” the English novelist Virginia Woolf once wrote. It’s no exaggeration to say that human character in India changed equally dramatically between 2014 and 2019 as the number of active smartphones in the country quadrupled from 100 million to 400 million.
Woolf, like many of her contemporaries in the early 20th century, was interested in how unprecedented economic and political forces such as industrialization and mass democracy, as well as newfangled communication technologies such as the telegraph and telephone, were altering human relations.
...One obvious result is the weakening of analytic ability -- the capacity to distinguish between the essential and the inessential, truth and untruth.
And when state education is poor, private education largely a con and competition fierce for even menial jobs, conditions are ripe not for revolution, as Marxists like to believe, but for a mass exodus into the smartphone’s screen.
Demagogic politicians adept at social media...potentially active citizens turned into passive consumers with diminished attention spans...
...what happens when systematically manufactured and manipulated images come to constitute a whole new alternate reality? This question roils even the largely literate and secular societies of the West today. But it’s particularly urgent in partially literate and intensely religious societies where myth and magic already have a strong grip on human imagination...
...In a surreal irony, a feat of amazing scientific ingenuity -- the smartphone -- is ushering hundreds of millions of people into a new magico-mythical age.
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