I can’t find a better title for today’s column than this remastered version of the mythical sketch starring Emilio Aragón on the program ‘Ni en vino, ni en directo’ in the eighties. Recognizing that yes, the ideological parents of this reflection are a politician and a journalist, who in a short space of time have coincided in their diagnosis about the quality of the image that the mirror of social networks gives us.
Although it is a truism, it is necessary to viralize the obviousness that what is seen on social networks is not a reflection of reality, but a distorted and deformed image by certain more or less spurious interests. But this is not the real problem, what is really fatal is that more and more political parties, large companies and individuals make their decisions for real life by looking at this virtual reflection.
The Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, recently affirmed that “less Twitter, less noise and fewer big headlines and that good politics is the one that focuses on the problems of citizenship”, implying and correctly, in my opinion , that there is a big difference between virtual and real politics. Of course, it is much easier and less sacrificing to carry out pseudo-politics in social networks than to apply and change laws to improve the lives of citizens. Yolanda Díaz’s dance partner in this column is the journalist Iker Jiménez, who in the final comment of his last Fourth Millennium program pulled off courage to, even by giving his own examples, to warn of the increasingly common error that is leading people with different responsibilities to make decisions exclusively because of the noise and immediacy emanating from the networks.
It has been a sibylline process, but without realizing it the game of mirrors has been reversed and although the networks should present the image of reality, what they bring to the viewer is a deformity encouraged by extremism, tension and intolerance, which in turn it governs the behaviors of many people in life in the flesh. Being in most cases the fear of virtual reaction the main ingredient to make one or another decision.
Social networks have given us certain positive aspects, but we must not lose focus and allow the compass of our lives not to work because of terrestrial magnetism, but because of a virtual one, behind which there are people, algorithms and robots that should be at the service from us and not the other way around.
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