Digital Diabetes and Retinopathy

Retinopathy is also known as diabetic eye disease is a state of impaired vision, which is caused due to diabetes and end up with complete blindness. Diabetics are prone and prospective of acquiring this impairment if don’t get their malady corrected. There is a far more dangerous variant of Retinopathy spreading like wild fire, caused due to Digital Diabetes.

Of all the 4 primary tastes, namely, sweet, sour, bitter and salty; and a number of others a human can feel and perceive, sweet dominates them all. So, we do sugar-coat almost everything to ingest even the most unpalatable ingredient. What lies inside, depends purely on the intent and capabilities of the person or entity packaging and dispensing the stuff.

Of late, with the abundance of information, we humans have become far too lazy. Our longest attention span has reduced to less than 8 minutes, even to the most important things for Life. During these short -sips of consumption of information and understanding thereto, we spend more on pre-drawn conclusions. When we should be working on the statistics or information and draw our own inferences.

Thanks to WhatsApp, Youtube and Facebook for providing the technology to supply such pre-cooked stories, we receive as forwards, in such grand scales like the supply chain for instant-noodles. We do not spend enough time or energy in validating or finding the logic or basis or basics of their information. On the other hand, Google tries to “Think” for us and stuffs upon us, things it thinks we-like, or so it pretends. But actually we are fed with things that Google wants us to consume. We are deliberately not discussing online marketing or algorithmic bias here.

While this is the state of affairs on the internet of things, look at what is happening around us. Every fragment of data is collated, cooked and presented as a story in a form that meets individual preferences, and thus, undoubtedly biased. A marketer mines for information supporting his lies. Land promoter over-writes the litigations on land-ownership with competitive pricing and other freebies. Politicians make mountains out of mole-hills to stay in the limelight. Media runs on sensationalism and TRPs, taking sensibilities of the society for a ride. An Alcoholic looks for stories that do not mind his bottle of heaven. The Lover distorts with poetry, music and art until the needs are met and faced with brutal reality. Employee seeks Boss’ attention towards his contributions to facilitate his raise, while the latter continues to highlight costs and losses and prove the former a failure. The same reverses when the Boss turns to his higher ups.

In all of the above and much more than everything, digital content and the technologies available alongside AI (Artificial Intelligence), are numbing human intelligence and are compelling us to see only those stories that taste sweet to our intellectual appetite. In the process, we have started lazily consuming the inferences fed by them to cater our sweet-tooth. We are being blind to the ‘obvious’ and thus, becoming victim to digital-diabetic-retinopathy.