Transparency should be edifying.
+If not, put that camera DOWN.
What a time it is to live. To exist. To be. Transparency is everywhere. It showcases itself in our modes of activism, consumerism and overall performance. We seek to show far more than we seek to actually know.
Today, digitalisation, it seems, means the removal of privacy and a renouncement of all reticence.
And at first this was favourable.
The world opened up. Portals were suddenly scattered all over the globe and one no longer need bear the mundanity of being solitary, or knowing only that which their foot could take them.
No, now we go wherever the cursor goes and thus our trajectory is unbounded.
I want to talk to about transparency, reader. The transformation of this word and its practice is nothing less of a modern day phenomenon.
Perhaps it started with the camera. And not the one that with demands of considerable effort to yield results. Instead, the one slim enough to fit into back-pockets and expose your entire world with a tap.
This camera, I argue, has been the poltergeist of our generation, stirring up a transparency endemic. The documentation of our days, no longer subtle, has seen transparency equated to acceptance. Why? Because our social currency now lies in exposure. An outcome of a post-truth world.
So, now transparency is omnipresent. But its rampancy wholly dilutes its purpose…for edification.
And the estrangement between the two tells us that we may have strayed too far.
The famous maxim (derived from scripture) that the truth will set you free, acutely tells us that the unveiling of something once concealed is supposed to transform us.
Because undoubtedly transparency is truth. Even if it’s someone’s truth.
When the camera is propped up in a person’s home/school/work, following them around like a third eye, this shouldn’t ensue for the sake of one man or woman’s vain exposure (it least it didn’t in the initial stages). The saturation of over-exposure and “transparency”culture in our society has led me to yearn for processes with substance; reason and motive that will aid people.
And so the question reverberates in my mind with each scroll: “What am I really watching you for?”
“Is tracking your life making me lose the thread of mine?”
Big questions, I know.
In a way what I’m signalling towards is the denouement of the cycle of aimless creation and consumption. A call-to-action that matters considerably as we manoeuvre into a time where critical and conscious digital interaction is imperative.
That isn’t to say one needs to adopt an IQ of 150 to make or view content— but rather a simple understanding of what may aid you and what may not.