upepo
Elder Lister
Can social media undo society to a point where it becomes intolerable? That is the question.
Tinder - One among the various dating apps that have been described as digital brothels.
Social media has been touted to be among the most beneficial innovations of information technology. Whereas that might be true, it seems to present different challenges to different populations. I will take one instance of the Kenyan population, where social media seems to take a particularly worrying trajectory which, if unchecked, could fundamentally alter the canons that define society.
Notably, and maybe the most critical aspect, is the liberal sexual culture that has been enabled by social media. Prostitution, once ostracized and limited to certain demographics, has been reinvented as a mass culture. It has been repackaged using terms such as hook-ups, token, appreciation, friends with benefits, and many other vocabularies that make the vocation sound normal and benign. Unlike before, when the trade was dominated by females who looked like they were created for it, today’s practitioners are girls who are barely into adulthood. And here we are talking about young, beautiful, perfectly normal-looking girls; not the dented and drunk specimens you find in bars. Similarly worrying is that their customers are equally young males.
The psychological price of this trend, only the future will tell. Take for instance a girl who starts doing hook-ups at 18 years. How many men do you think this girl will go through in just 5 years, before she hits 23 years? Similarly, when their male counterparts can simply swipe or click to access a woman, what new brain circuitry will take root? These and other important questions may have to be addressed at some point. Otherwise, there is a high likelihood we soon will have a country of majority single mothers, majority fatherless kids, and majority drunk, unmarried men.
Tinder - One among the various dating apps that have been described as digital brothels.
Social media has been touted to be among the most beneficial innovations of information technology. Whereas that might be true, it seems to present different challenges to different populations. I will take one instance of the Kenyan population, where social media seems to take a particularly worrying trajectory which, if unchecked, could fundamentally alter the canons that define society.
Notably, and maybe the most critical aspect, is the liberal sexual culture that has been enabled by social media. Prostitution, once ostracized and limited to certain demographics, has been reinvented as a mass culture. It has been repackaged using terms such as hook-ups, token, appreciation, friends with benefits, and many other vocabularies that make the vocation sound normal and benign. Unlike before, when the trade was dominated by females who looked like they were created for it, today’s practitioners are girls who are barely into adulthood. And here we are talking about young, beautiful, perfectly normal-looking girls; not the dented and drunk specimens you find in bars. Similarly worrying is that their customers are equally young males.
The psychological price of this trend, only the future will tell. Take for instance a girl who starts doing hook-ups at 18 years. How many men do you think this girl will go through in just 5 years, before she hits 23 years? Similarly, when their male counterparts can simply swipe or click to access a woman, what new brain circuitry will take root? These and other important questions may have to be addressed at some point. Otherwise, there is a high likelihood we soon will have a country of majority single mothers, majority fatherless kids, and majority drunk, unmarried men.
