The Age of Appearance 

  Chidi Amuta By ENGAGEMENTS

In the new world, we differ decisively from our children. We read and reflect; they see instant images and decide or judge based on appearances and move on. We are coming from the age of ideas nurtured by the culture of print. We are conditioned by a habit of reading, study and reflection before careful and patient judgment. The people of today live in the age of images created and dispersed by the internet. Their world is an avalanche of images that become an appearance instantly put in every hand all over the world.

Today’s people have no time for lengthy information, prolonged arguments, deep reflections and convoluted abstract speculations. They see the world as a parade of images packaged to wear an appearance that must be grasped at a glance. They have limited attention span. It is not beyond a few words, maybe a paragraph at most. They decide instantly and pronounce judgment in a hurry and move on to the next slide of images and appearances. The trending appearances do not last; they expire quickly only to be replaced by even trendier ones.

Their approval or condemnation is instant and unsparing. You are either a villain or hero, a saint or damned sinner destined for hellish incineration or heavenly bliss and adoration. They click ‘like’ or insert thumbs down emoji or simply press ‘delete’ on their phone and there you go. In their world, you either trend or vanish from reckoning. If you trend for a good cause in their estimation, you could in one instant graduate from broke and broken to a multi billionaire in just a flash without knowing exactly why fortune smiled at you. In the internet age of appearance, you become rich without knowing exactly why or intending to be so. Forget the excessive sweat and heavy lifting of the old ‘luggage’ economy in which you needed to dig, excavate, place order, clear and forward stuff, sell it to needy people and wait to be paid. This is not the world in which you need to build a factory, produce something , haul it all over the place and wait for returns. The images that drive the new economy have a light footprint. Images become appearances. Appearance becomes money delivered by ghosts into your phone by a bank App.

If you are the favourite of the people now called the Gen Z or the mob called netizens, you can do no wrong. Do not ask them why. The answer is in the question and vice versa. You do not argue with any type of fanatics especially the ones with no defined faith. They either love or despise on the basis of images and appearances floating on the web. Please show me a 15 year old clutching a hard copy newspaper on the streets these days. I can hardly find any. But you probably have a multitude of 12 year olds in your neighbourhood clutching multiple cell phones made in ‘China, Vietnam or Alaba! The age of rigorous reasoning is dead; long live the tribe of viral things.

I have lived mostly a life of reading and writing. Over 45 years clutching a pen or tapping away at a key board. What I write ranges from the esoteric academic to the easy journalistic mass material. It depends on the target audience. Similarly, my target audience ranges from the cultic professional academic to the street side bantering crowd. In all of it, our relevance as writers depends on those who read us and get influenced by us.

Most of our so -called serious readers have either died or lost interest in the things that bother us. The age of reflection, logic and reason is fast disappearing. We live in the age of snap shots, of fleeting images that hardly endure. Reality is a set of fleeting images that congeal into appearances.  Catch it or it vanishes forever. Take a closer look and the image you swore was real is merely an appearance constantly altered by technology. Make-up artists, touch- up Apps, filters  determine what we eventually see. We no longer know which appearance is real or original or which is fake as in ‘fake news’. Perhaps everything is fake or make belief in the end.

Technology has converted us old school writers into what my friend Ayi Kwei Armah, the Ghanaian writer,  calls ‘communicators doomed to silence’! We write, we scream, we preach. But there is hardly a listener out there. Every week, some readers react to my weekly columns but most end up with the question: “But who is listening?” People now know that words alone cannot change their sordid reality. Their oppressors, the new African politicians,  have developed a thick skin. If you criticize them too much, they hire their own battery of internet hacks to invade the cyber space with their praise songs.

It used to be said that “the pen is mightier than the sword”. On going to meet an outstanding African general who was also the president of his country, he stepped forward and on shaking my hands exclaimed: ”the pen is mightier than the sword!”. I quickly retorted: “Only when the sword is sheathed, sir!” He smiled and offered me a seat in his office. But these days, the pen is dead in every sense. Long live the keyboard. There is no longer any pen to rival the sword! What use is a pen or even a sword in the age of wars that will be directed by AI? Artificial Intelligence will write the next scripts. Computer algorithms will target the new enemies, map the battlefield and launch the next attacks. In Gaza, AI is being applied to identify who is Hamas! Those targeted include children and hospital patients!

Statesmen as war leaders will soon go out of business. Our young tech smart kids will rule the world from the control decks of computers without uttering a word. Already, smart tech savvy American 17-year old kids in the deserts of Nevada are the real commanders of the drone wars against terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and the bad precincts of the Middle East. They track the enemy from several thousand miles away and strike them down with unimaginable precision.

These days, no one has time for us old school writers and pundits. Even our immediate families, the ones that should be our captive audience, conveniently -and politely- ignore us. Among my children, only the eldest two find time to read my opinion essays when I draw their attention to them. ‘Thanks Dad, I’ll get back to that later!” Of course, they hardly ever revert. It is either they have no time for us and our lengthy prose or we are actually writing irrelevant rubbish.

The younger the kids are, the more indifferent they tend to be to the things that trouble us. Our preferred solutions are too complex and convoluted. They want the fastest most straightforward solutions. “Sorry Dad, can you make this a bit simpler?”

The older people out there who encounter us for the first time in public – airports, hotel lobbies, restaurants-scream aloud: ‘ Oh!, you in life and blood at last? I have known you by reputation.’ What reputation? A lifetime spent screaming at generations of deaf politicians in words that sound more empty with the passage of time? Anyway, they request to take a selfie with you grinning like a lost raccoon. You now know that you have become a virtual museum piece, something soon to become mostly of antique value!

The younger children are frightened of reading. They have to be compelled, threatened and cajolled to read even their school texts. When they do, they are in a hurry to get it over with so that they can return to the more urgent world of video games, Instagram, Tik Tok, Snap Chat,  Facebook and social media in general. They are more in tune with the lives and foibles of the global celebrity universe where they feed mostly on images and appearances.  

For them, news must not exceed the headline and first sentence or a short paragraph. Relevant information is what can be contained on the screen of their cell phones and absorbed at a glance on the cell phone screen. Anything longer is an infliction, an atrocity that messes with their mental health! Forget lengthy news reports, features, opinion articles, informed logical discourse etc. Forget blockbuster new books. Few will read them. That is why someone said the best place to hide a scandal in Nigeria is inside a book! It may never be found!

Luckily, higher education all over the world is still dependent on books- digital, audio or virtual. Books must be read for knowledge to be acquired, used or transmitted. I always tell my college age children: If you want that fancy Ivy League degree, I will pay for it but you have to sit down and read the damned books and write those term papers with titles that are not so savvy or sexy!

Perhaps it is the fear of reading books  and the study that goes with reading them that has produced the new epidemic of fake degrees and microwave certificates on sale at Igbosere and Oshodi or next door in Benin and Togo. Just pay and you have graduated! You can rent a chorister’s garment as academic gown and clutch an old newspapers rolled into a scroll as certificate. Perfect photo opportunity to be posted online: another Nollywood actor honoured with a doctorate degree! Distinguished Senator now a proud honorary doctor of letters and business! This is the age of appearances after all!

The new world has been shaped by technology to zoom in and zoom out of fleeting images and the appearance of things previously imagined: celebrity life style, designer toilet tissue, fast expensive cars, designer fads, terror strikes, all manner of sensational things. Imagine how things like thieving politicians on their way to jail can trend. In a world ruled by images and appearances, the more different and shocking the image, the better. Bisexual and trans sexual extremes, boys in braids, in skirts and bedecked in ear rings, nose rings and pierced everything! Girls sounding like big boys from hormone therapy overdose and sex change procedures executed by quack surgeons in Dubai.

What we are witnessing is the trauma of the shift from print to the visual culture of images. When the printing press emerged, it replaced the oral story teller with the silence of the book and the printed word. Those who could read in those days were revered as magicians, people with the incredible capacity to glance at printed pages and decipher meaning from there. They were held in awe. In my village, the few men who were literate enough to read letters from relations living far away in the cities were mini deities. How could a mere mortal look at a piece of paper and tell you what your son in far away Lagos wanted done in my bush village?

Now images have replaced the word. The appeal of images is more emotional than rational. The age of images and appearances converts the citizenry into ‘followers’ and ‘influencers’, into netizens and less of citizens, not leaders or thinkers . The participants and netizens of the internet image age hardly aspire to any depth let alone leadership. They are just a faceless, valueless cheer leading mass, a Greek chorus with neither heart and soul nor tangible presence but difficult to ignore. The Athenian chorus at least felt something, knew something and believed in something. They shouted down bad kings and hailed gladiators. Our new internet mob also fell kings and despots if they ‘appear’ bad for democracy as mob rule. Mr. President, follow your own lane and don’t disturb our peace. We are busy surfing the web, browsing the world of images and appearances!

The social media age also believes in something. The illusions in the images that rule their world are the realities they swear by. They have now popularized many things including a new ailment called Mental Health. If you hire a youth or someone who is actually lazy and you insist on normal working hours and rigorous office ethics, they revolt and if you insist on discipline, they accuse you of messing with their Mental Health. They could quit working only to return home to the long suffering parents, to do nothing except feast on yet more images and appearances on the omnipresent screens and monitors around the house. We live in a world where the modern upper middle class living space is a hall of screens and mirrors:  cell phone screens which are also cameras in every hand, television screens in every room, computer screens, prying CCTV cameras and monitors everywhere! In these smart homes, we virtually live in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, a world of eternal self inflicted surveillance: ‘Big Brother is Watching You!’

If our present is a world ruled by images and appearance, the future is perhaps a world of universal illusions because these images and appearances are mostly unreal. It is and it is not! Everything looks like everything else. Everything that appears like something will become nothing eventually.