It goes without saying that the world we are living now has becoming smaller due the interconnectedness of its population. People are connected to each other in an unlimited, extreme and tremendous way.
The rapid development of information technology has enabled people from far distance to interact to each other in a matter of seconds.
The advancement of the technology also has brought down geographical boundaries and people can share information and ideas with one another more widely.
Various platforms of social media has widened the circle of friends, partners and connections of people.
Statistics indicates that there are around 3.5 billion social media users globally while Facebook and Whatsapp alone are handling 60 billion massages daily.
Looking at this phenomenon from the positive side, this advancement of information digital technology can be seen as a good sign of human development where people are becoming more knowledgeable and updated with information around them.
Peter Drucker, an Austrian author who is described as the father of Modern Management, talked about the rise of knowledge worker as the primary unit of the contemporary information and innovation-based knowledge society.
But on a more critical note, there are a few worrying trends on the impact of social media on society. Two most pertinent aspects that digital information technology has left great impact are social and epistemological.
From the social aspect, the digital advancement has created what is called ‘social displacement’ where time spent in social media sites is replacing the ‘face to face’ time especially for close friends and family.
Research findings show that there was a decline of social interaction especially among the teens due to the increased digital media use. The study also found that adolescents who spent the most time on social media and the least time in face-to-face social interactions reported the most loneliness.
Among other psychological impacts of excessive social media usage are depression, anxiety, body image, bullying, fear of missing out and sleep quality.
On the issue concerning epistemology and knowledge, the question raised is that does the abundant of information necessarily bring us to wisdom, which is the highest and virtuous level of human knowledge? We recall the saying of Wilson, the American biologist E.O Wilson that “We are drowning with information while starving for wisdom.”
Wisdom implies systematic, balanced, and harmonious state of human understanding from the information that they receive. It is regarded as the highest level of knowledge due to its virtuous nature in grasping universal knowledge and recognizing the proper places of things in the worldview scheme. Wisdom is regarded as one of the cardinal virtues by the sages in the past. Plato, the early Greek philosopher, said that wisdom is knowledge that is pure, eternal, immortal, unified, and unchanging.
The Qur’an regards wisdom as a highest gift from God and closely connected with goodness “He grants wisdom to whom He pleases and he to whom wisdom is granted receives indeed a benefit overflowing; but none will grasp the message but men of understanding. (Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah 2:269)
Hence the question remains, how does the abundant of information that we get in this highly digitalized world can be transformed into wisdom?
One of the obstacles of this process is that social media, due to its open and free flow system, lacks element of control mechanism. How many times we experienced in a whatsapp group or facebook discussions, when an important message or information was posted and began to be discussed by members in the group, suddenly a new message came in and disrupted the flow of the original discussion.
Also, due to disparity of the level of knowledge among members of the group, there are also imbalances in the content of the discussion especially when everybody can express whatever they wish from the most simple matter to the most difficult one. This is not yet taking into account those who left group due dissatisfaction, emotion and anger especially when political issues come to the fore.
With this nature of discussion, not only it is challenging to arrive at wisdom as far as social media is concerned, it may also lead to the contrary namely confusion and error in understanding and knowledge especially when information that take place are contradictory and false.
In sum, it is of course too ambitious to expect that digital technology and social media to lead human being towards wisdom since they are only technical means that keep changing over time. But since this means has left great impact to the life of the people especially the new generations and is slowly replacing the traditional way of educating and imparting knowledge, it is indeed something worth contemplating.