In the ‘real’ world, there are physical, territorial, social and economic boundaries people are forced to respect and by which they are constrained. In the ‘surreal’ virtual world of social media, however, these do not exist – there can be immediate connect between people from all parts of the world, a commonality of interests transcending all barriers, and there can be love, irrespective of all restrictions. It has evolved its own rules, and communities, to the extent that, for many, it has become the reality they exist in.
So it is that women from India and Pakistan seek out their social media lovers in the other’s land, whom they have never physically met, driven by a passion people are finding hard to understand or describe. It is not as if they are benefiting on their own volition from services provided by dating or other such apps – it is the consequence, rather, of entering a world other than the determined physical one they exist in – where only their perceptions of themselves matter.
Of course, soon enough, the real world will intrude, probably in a cruel manner, but it is clear there are new dimensions emerging from within the human consciousness that will play a larger role in the future – much like that expected from Artificial Intelligence. It could have the potential to transform humanity, make it a genuinely global community, but not necessarily. For, it is a fact that social media has also become the means to communicate hate and radicalise people on the basis of race, religion and ethnicity. All in a make-believe world that ignores the physical reality till everything collides in cataclysmic fashion.
It is part of the evolutionary process and the survivors will write the narrative on what happened. Was the trans-national romance a mismatch, or did it provide the genetic advantage to advance further on the evolutionary scale? Will the world be one, or will every tribe in hill and valley demand a separate existence, breeding insularity and hate? It will be an experience that will have to be lived through, even as the past has equipped us poorly with the means to deal with it. Redundancy will come faster; innovation will even more be a desperate necessity for survival.
