There was a gap between my inner space and the outside world; a gap that I was painfully aware of. Books saved me. Books held my pieces together. Books loved me. And I loved them in return. I loved them with my entire soul... Writers need to protect their inner space. That’s where our stories come from. We ought to be selective and careful about the amount of time we spend on the Internet. We have to find what works for us personally. I prefer Twitter to Facebook. I find Twitter more suitable for introverts. I tweet in two languages, Turkish and English. I don’t gossip. I write about books, ideas, culture, art, politics, and women. It makes me happy to see a follower from a remote town in Anatolia respond to another follower from Quebec or Delhi or Edinburgh. Social media is also a political platform. Our leaders understand this better than anyone else. That’s why they shut down YouTube; that’s why they shut down Twitter for as long as they could and are still openly suspicious of the digital world. At a time when private Turkish TV channels were showing documentaries on penguins and wildlife, the clashes on the streets were broadcast via the Internet. People walked around with their mobile phones recording, sending pictures. Suddenly journalism flowed bottom-up, and so did storytelling. Yet at the same time, there was a lot of misinformation being circulated. Fake photos, galvanizing messages, digital lynching . . . The duality between the public persona and the private self is a duality forged by the false assumption that the Self is a monolithic—at least a consistent—whole. Gossip, slander, misinformation, and hate speech abound. The Internet is home to extremisms of all kinds, breeding racist, misogynist, and xenophobic narratives. It is also a dangerous distraction for those who want to focus on one area. Perhaps more important, it makes us arrogant, giving us the false assumption that we know things when, in truth, we only skim surfaces. The chasm between knowledge and wisdom has never been greater.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 05:43:34 +0000
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