Cape Town - I used to like sunsets. I also liked birds and buildings and blocks of flats; cacti and clouds, cappuccinos and cats. I enjoyed knowing we all have private moments: the funny feeling of seeing a single reed waving on the banks of a river; the sunlight at a certain time of day; the office chairs which remind you of stormtroopers.
Now much of this unique point of view is just fodder: snap a picture, post to Instagram and wait for the Likes.
There’s that saying about a tree falling in a forest and if no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound. With the rise of social media, it’s as though we’ve felled every tree, recording every thump into the soil. We’ve documented the birds falling, the squirrels running, the sound of chainsaws and the shafts of sunlight. If we could, we’d post the smell of it – a scratch-and-sniff of pine, petrol and undergrowth. A friend told me recently she doesn’t pee in front of her husband and never discusses bodily functions with him. “You’ve got to keep some mystery,” she told me, spooning ice into her wine. As someone who lives in a house with a broken bathroom door, I thought she must be mad. Or Dickensian. I imagined her sleeping in high-collared nighties and applying lipstick before her husband woke up. Surely the point of sharing your life with someone is sharing all your humanity? Letting it all hang out?
For a minute, I thought she might have a point, and a part of me hankered after Dickensian days. Back then, if something evoked strong feelings in you – love, syphilis, the way shadows fell over the moors, the fragrance of violets – you wrote about it in a diary, or sent a letter sealed with wax, or painted in oils while wearing an unattractive smock. Moments belonged to only the viewer. The interior life had a solid door.
Sure, this period was too restrained, too repressed and too full of cotton. And the thought of chamber pots is kind of gross. But now it appears we’ve gone to the opposite extreme. We flood the internet with versions of ourselves. We share our dinners with strangers, our nights out with followers, our favourite shadows with fake swamis in Texas (he’s a new follower and his hair worries me).
Last week, while sitting at a café, I watched a row of sparrows perched on a telephone line. They were silent, tiny bullets against blue. They were oblivious to the rush around them: cars pulling out, the man sweeping the pavement below them, the cable car sweeping up to the top of the mountain. I took a picture of them and posted it to Instagram. I couldn’t keep them to myself.
And that’s the conundrum of social media. While it allows us to share, cross global divides and gain access to ideas, it often skews the human experience. Ubiquitous sunsets become Hallmark cards, the Northern Lights feel like something we’ve seen and a quiet communion with sparrows is whored out for approval. I stole the souls of eight sparrows. I will surely burn in sparrow hell.
However, because I’m an optimist and am on heavy medication, I believe all is not lost – that we are more than selfies and duck faces and pictures of birds. Society is comprised of layers, and technology is just another addition. We’re still figuring out how to use it.
In A Tale Of Two Cities, Dickens wrote: “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to each other.” Even in this era of over-sharing, iPhone moments and status updates, it’s comforting to know this still applies. Whether we pee privately or openly, we each have an interior door behind which we are madly, wholly and deeply human.
And maybe one day we’ll learn how to integrate technology into our lives and stop being so starstruck by what it can do. Maybe pictures of sunsets will become passé and birds on wires a private memory. Cacti will be allowed to grow silently, cappuccinos will be savoured quietly and trees will fall in forests, their sound reverberating in us as something we know.
Cape Argus