It is no secret how hyper-mediatized our societies are. Nowadays, information simply flows in a constant river of data, making it easy to dehumanize it, to disconnect it from the human being behind it. Experiences and memories have just become numbers and, with luck, an ephemeral reflection of happiness, a “like”. Even though we are more exposed to other humans than what we have ever been, we are less capable to understand others and to put ourselves in their perspectives. This phenomenon is caused not by the massification of information, but rather by our own incapacity to process that information. Fortunately, it can be reversed by being conscious about how we consume and expose ourselves to data.
In late 2020 and early 2021, a collaboration between the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) in Caracas (Venezuela) and the University at Albany (SUNY) in Albany (U.S.A) took place. The students from Caracas had the opportunity to work closely with their peers in Albany to compare their cultures, having by one of the results, a comparison of popular culture through the then arising TikTok. In the process, we learned how faces are hidden behind the content we unconsciously consume, and how social media can be used not only to massify information, but to give spotlight to our human experience. Topics such as activism in movements like Black Lives Matter and the perception of freedom were specially aborded, putting into contrast the different perspectives between human groups.
Daniel Strocchia