Jamaica's Addiction to Social Media and Negative News

March 20, 2021

An accident on Hope Road could be livestreamed, disseminated by orbiting satellites to every corner of the globe in seconds. A Jamaican living in Germany or Australia now has intimate, real-time knowledge of everything happening in Jamaica. Shown live and direct on smart devices over the would wide web.

Jamaicans has fallen in love with smart phone technology and Social media. It is the first thing they reach for when anything out of the ordinary happens. Platforms from Porn hub, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook to Instagram are filled with Jamaican contents. Most Jamaicans would not reach for their phones to livestream or even record happy moments, such moments are not regarded as sharable. The contents that are mostly shared on Social Media must be off the highest shock value to generate the right amount attention and likes.

There are lots of Jamaican sex videos on various sex sites, with death and destruction everywhere else, the more gruesome the better. The people taking the pictures and videos of these gruesome death and destruction must have very strong stomachs. Because these are some of the most disgusting things people should not see but as a society we have normalized these contents. So, every successive content must be more gruesome than the ones before in order to maintain the same level of shock value.

Even though I warned people not to post these videos in the WhatsApp groups or send them to me, without at least first declaring it is Gruesome Death and Destruction content, they still do. What is this obsession with crime scenes and accident scenes, showing various body parts, blood, guts and brains, the innards of the human anatomy, on display for all to see? Gruesome Death and Destruction is like porn to the Jamaican mind.

The question is, are there more death, destruction and counterproductive behavior in Jamaica now compared to the past or does the use of technology make it seems as if we are now living in a hellish world and on a hellish island?

One cannot deny that the rate at which our news comes to us is unprecedented. We take our mobile devices everywhere, even when we are sitting on the toilet, we are still connected to the global world. It is the first thing we reach for in the mornings, when we wake up or at nights, if we cannot sleep.

If you want to see young people lose their minds, turn off the Wi-Fi, I dare you! My sister asked me to fix her Wi-Fi, which meant, I had to reboot the devices a couple times. One would thing, I was torturing my nieces and nephews, beating them with sticks and waterboarding them like detainees ate GITMO. It was as if, judgement day had reached the island, end of the world and fire and brimstone was raining down from the heavens above. Shutting down the Wi-Fi is like cutting off their supply of oxygen.

Back in my days, all we had was one black and white TV (Westinghouse), one unpredictable television station (JBC), to be viewed on either channel 13 or 11 and a very unpredictable power supply company (JPS). On any given day, one or more of the above would stop working. Which meant we had to go and find something more creative to occupy our time. It made no sense crying about what you know will happen, it was not if but a very frequent when, they will stop working. I was wrong to call JPS unpredictable because it was very predictable that the B6 generator would stop working. It was not uncommon for you to be watching a mystery, one of those 'who done it" shows and just before you find out who did it, light gone or the station brake down and when it comes back they never resume the program.

Back in my days, an accident on Hope Road would only be witnessed by the people walking and driving on hope road, at that time. Later, you might tell a friend and if the story was interesting, he may tell another friend, but such news only had about 3 degrees of separation at most. An accident on Hope Road would not normally make the news, unless it was very serious. If 100 things happened in some other parish around the island, or even in different parts of Kingston and St. Andrew, chances are we would not know anything about it. We had no mobile smart phones to flash Breaking News across the screen or notify us that an event was being livestreamed, in fact we had no internet.

So, we went on with our lives, blissful in our ignorance, we did not have to live in fear and a state of high anxiety. These days, we are being bombarded by negative, counterproductive, dysfunctional, violent news and we live on high alert, in fear and with high anxiety because of it. Young people have normalized it, so it takes more to shock them.

Back in my days, everything was hard to come by, even porn. This was an area where we had to use our imagination or 5-year old porn magazine we had hidden under our bed. God bless National Geographic because without it and those tribes that wear little cloths or the taboo edition, I do not know what we would do. Today graphic porn content is just a Google search away. Delivered over high speed internet and in clear high definition.

And if you spell it wrong, google will suggests the correct spelling and deliver your content.

Today’s generation has become so Narcissistic and needy, always looking for approval from likes boasting about how much virtual friends they have. Living most of their days, in front of their phones taking selfies and posting them online. I feel sorry for them sometimes, the shallow generation. Today, people acting out online for likes are regarded as Social Media Influencers.

I once watched my niece having a conversation to her friend, who sat in the same room, on the same couch without both saying a word. If It is was not for the mutual laughing while they typed, I would never know they were on speaking terms. Maybe we will evolve to lose our ability to speak. If you do not use it, you will lose it.