Bizarre Social Dynamics and Anomalies
When we look at young people's social history, they are considered to be critical and central to society and its wellbeing and identity. Hence the social dynamics around them and the stereotypes claimed by various groups influence their self-confidence, self-perception and modernity meaning. There are no social realities today, but incongruous social realities, untruths, and misconstrued identities that have eaten away unity, harmony, and mutual understanding among groups in our society, and youth are drowning in confusion, inner turmoil, and identity crisis in this situation.
Today, young people are struggling because the identity struggles and the illusion that they can be anywhere are in reality ending nowhere. They are both restless and non-serious. They just keep their mobile phones and their camera occupied. The question to ponder is why particularly young people are now reacting so quickly to anything, especially on social media. But such a common dysfunctional tendency has roots. Maybe they have plenty of free time, addiction to social media, tradition of giving unsolicited random advice during the day, and maybe the effects of living in a war zone. Social media is also full of disinformation that is being created and repeated without giving any thought to its very purpose and effect, simply because we assume that digital or virtual identities are just virtual realities, not the fact itself. Is it our shallowness, less exposure to ignorance in practice that has somewhat blended with our already high political culture that might make us respond to something now or maybe it's all inside of us that we think it's really happening outside and that's why we're illusory?
Needless to say, we are living in an age in which all politics is identity politics, and it's not only about feminism or anti-racism activism alone, it also has a major negative dimension. It has already entered various other areas of government, society and its institutions. The whole trend of other minorities or certain racial / ethnic groups by identifying them as either terrorists or intentional carriers of Corona is now taken as declaring their superior identity against the inferior and poor identity of others. Even the provocative rants of the media, high decibel and widely coloured and racist prime time incite the ignorant among the dominant groups, which also leads to violence against these vulnerable Muslim families or other small groups. All of this occurs in the distressing times of today when we should have been united to fight the deadly pandemic. The sensitive generation is watching and these unfortunate happenings in the routine give them a different sense of rendered binaries. A significant section of media has seamlessly become an identity-politics project agency of the hate brigade — it has contributed to the alienation of the right-thinking people. Society has drastically changed and psychological pathologies have been accepted leading to resentment and mistrust. This too is defining new conditions in culture.
Identity and Hate vs Reality
And when we accept truth for the sake of our identity and mark the other identities, there is a rejection of the facts. There is a wider segment of academics, community leaders, even politicians, etc., who are quiet about these brazen developments in our society, but the issue is that their silence (for their own reasons might be extension of services, for taking on new assignments or keeping in mind next elections) is actually violence and has been mistaken as there is nothing to worry about. There is a stream of misinformation around and types of social media plate are its lucrative carriers, but our casual approach to anything and taking media as a credible source, everything is communicated without verifying its validity, which further shapes a whole range of conspiracy theories and gossip mills. It also has significant consequences as young people re-socialize out of insecurity and anxiety and even turn to violence. This has slowly influenced ethnocentrism, where people view their identity as superior and begin to judge other identities by viewing their own as the ideal example. There are thousands of false videos, older and irrelevant videos posted for a specific group to fuel rage in society, thereby shaping social media as a hate medium that affects youth from all sides. Both are concerted measures and must be well supervised in the battle against untruth and disinformation, by the government and individuals themselves.
Liquid Modernity and Fear
We live in a liquid modernity – the concept coined in the 1990s by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman that influenced our endless flow of identities and left us rootless and unpredictable. The youth of today are impulsive, as their personalities tend to change from time to time. Hence, we will go back to the past to grasp the present. We have to realize the mess we created on our world, our climate, animal and plant life, forest cover, water sources, and marine life in the midst of the pandemic today. We have all taken on different goals. This is now a world of plastic, created and manufactured without any knowledge of its end. We are all artificial earth beings where we see less and less humanity everywhere and more and more artificial. Also, as a response to all of our self-made crises we came up with NGOs and their activism mainly for the sake of activism, the Andolan culture that practically doesn't change anything (as the state hardly answers) but has easily become a semi-government business. The current mess in which we find ourselves is the product of harm from our own senseless creations. The own modernist developments have backfired on modernity itself.
Liquid modernity has influenced what Baumann calls liquid fear, as all experiences and relationships have become more fragile than people taking charge of their lives. Yet media has become an uncontrollable global force separating today's global as well as natural environment. Hate in society has proven that we have no power over the situation around us, we can't avoid it, but we just have to live it by interacting with it.
Living in the Dark Dystopian Society
All around it seems uncomfortable right from media to family relationships to corporate community to friendship and kinship, modified neighbourhood environment, nasty religious views, sectarian hatred, flawed modern education, bad science, etc. The truth is just the delusion now as the entire method is completely misconstrued. The everyday life we are living now or our minute-to-minute commentary on social media is simply our escape mechanism from the ordinary that we interpret to be our socially deemed responsibility and may be our newly discovered status symbol. In reality, the visual image of that celebrated uselessness is our disillusionment with our identity.
Final Thoughts
The fragility and insignificance are embodied in the way societal power structures function and establish the standards of social behaviour and routine refused access. Amidst professional failure and financial instability, our suffocated, powerless and humiliated selves are fostering more weakness and confusion. Also totally ignoring the importance of the state's youth's emotional well-being, there is a misconstrued picture of them being radicalized, evil, not so law-abiding, etc., which has been promoted by the media over the years and is now hardly recognized. Only the family somehow plays a crucial role and helps form self-perception in the midst of socially generated dangerous and incongruous social realities, but youth's choked and muddled voices yearn to see the rectification of the various complexities of systemic violence prevalent in society. Youth cannot simply be reduced to the embers of confrontation or resistance, but the systemic intention of the state must be to forge unity and create a kind of community we need today, a youth-cantered community.