By Eric Wamanji
At 8:05 a.m. Elsie has stopped panting and is feverishly tapping on her keyboard. You may think she is the busiest journalist in town filing a scoop; but alas! She is schmoozing, online. It’s another day in her life where the virtual world is beholden, and life is depressing without Internet connectivity. She is entangled in the obsession that chatting online is the ultimate ecstasy.
Yet, Elsie, a millennial, is a template of a generation whose lives are gradually mashed by the digital phenomena.
Are you like Elsie? You relish that patter ? You feel sick when Internet connection is down because you will miss what the world is chattering about? Beware- you’re gently clicking yourself to insanity!
But first things first: the cyberspace is king. It’s possibilities mind-boggling. It has spurred trade, democracy, knowledge… I recall as a political communication student, the Internet’s revolutionary prowess was just incredible. I even went gaga when I stumbled upon the thought-provoking works of Jurgen Herbamas’ Structural Transformation of the public sphere. So riveting was Herbamas that I mused studying the blogosphere as the emergent neo-agora for democratic pursuits.
Yet, amazingly, the cyberspace also churns out a constellation of psychotic characters. And this hurts employers as much as users.
Technology’s sublime destructive capabilities especially the social sites, keep researchers pondering. Clearly, Internet is rapidly transforming the very social nature and structures of humanity. It shredded letter writing and is threatening to mute conversations. We are being remodeled into cyborgs and rapidly become what artist Robert Armstroy calls ‘couch potatoes’.
People love chatting online because real-life talk demands sincerity. It requires sensitivity to emotions, voice tone, and body language. Technology affords us a cold heart. We lose our sense of empathy and emotion. Furthermore, the internet has plucked us out of reality to the short-lived fantasy of the virtual.
Philip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy says ‘building a Facebook profile is one way that individuals … feel important and accepted.’ This is a pointer that the profile of an avid social media user is that riddled by inadequacies especially acceptance. True, the social sites massages the ego, are therapeutic; vicariously though.
No doubt addiction to social sites is posing challenges to work output, our relationships with colleagues, friends and family. So bad is the situation that most corporates have blocked access to these platforms.
Take Elsie for instance; her world revolves around the cyberspace completely detached from the everyday realities of work ethic.
Psychologists aver that Internet addiction has a negative effect to the human mind; it causes reactive psychosis (temporary insanity). Some argue that the brain of an internet addict is no different from that of drug addicts.
In fact, the new frontier for employers is to include ‘cybernacotic’ in their battle against substance abuse. Peter Whybro the director of Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour calls the internet “electronic cocaine.”
Newsweek of July 16, 2012 reports that researchers are even “investigating technology’s potential to server people’s ties with reality, fueling hallucinations, delusions and genuine psychosis…”
Aha! Now, you thought that chat online is classy? Think twice, you are getting hooked into an opiating constituent, one click at a time.
It’s commonplace for internet addicts to curse a million times when Internet connectivity is poor. The nut cases have devised ways to crack the blocked codes to gain access online; some like Kamau have use broadband internet access to skirt these barriers.
When you waste your time online pouring a barrage of unprintable, you sully your moral, shrink your cognition and you turn yourself a couch potato. Psychologist Larmy Rosen argues that this is the path to insanity. I agree.
It is why an inquiry into employees’ lives in the cyberspace is fundamental not only because of its ruinous designs on employees, but also hazard of tarnishing a brand.
I find it unnerving, if not sickening when my company name or logo is mentioned in a profile chockfull of nudities and drunkenness of the weekend expeditions on an employee’s social site.
It is embarrassing to learn that the brand and the reputation we so painfully construct is stained by such recklessness. Hence, a challenge to management: if the brand is to retain its sanctity, employees should desist from using the company identity in their personal Facebook profiles. If they must, then they must enter into covenants to maintain conversations and images that are decent and generally acceptable in society.
In the meantime, we need counseling for cybernacotics.