INTRODUCTION:

Background of the study:

"Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled" (Huxley, 231)

This is not just a mere threat, but it is also a foretelling for the 21st century world, that the author has guessed before. He wrote these lines in between the ongoing events of the two World Wars. That time, scientific and technological innovations were emerging rapidly. Consequently, this led Huxley to think of the upcoming danger of the next century. Merely hundred years have passed, and have words become true in a genuine sense. In this age, people are just the puppets at the hands of this tyrannical innovative world. Brave New World has already talked about this impending danger that was waiting for human beings. It is true that the growing digitalisation and mechanical dependence have lowered down the manual labour. But simultaneously, it creates a problem so far the mental peace is concerned. The increasing cyber crimes start to dehumanise people through the means of hacking, distorted photographs, blackmailing, spamming and spoofing. Out of such threats people are bound to commit suicide or are involved in several addictions. Thus, this world becomes a mirror reflection of John( who ultimately hangs himself out of existential crisis) in Brave New World . In this pessimistic universe, people are totally the slave of artificial intelligence which surpasses the natural intellectual capability of the brain. Day by day people are getting terrified by technological overpower. Even, they start to forget that they are the superior creatures on this earth. Because, where creation surpasses the creator, then the normal system of life loses its control. As in the words of W. B. Yeats :

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy loosed upon the world, (2-4)

The creator should have the brindle of his own creation. But digital revolution and its consequences like hedonistic lifestyle, corruption, totalitarian mentality - cannot let humans stick to humanism. Their self anarchy leads their innovation to surpass themselves. Technology is not the product of a decade, but of ages. The growing demands of people have given birth to virtual reality. Nowadays it has become so popular that people cannot separate themselves from digital platforms. As a result, lifestyle is now exploited mercilessly by it. The hackers have got a chance to trap people by various means. Actually their own ignorance and extreme self frustration for the lack of prosperity push them to fulfill their selfishness in such a manner. At the end of a day they achieve nothing except momentary satisfaction. Thus the sole purpose of the investigator is to study the impact of the digital world in the present society as well as to get an inner view of life that is at stake.

OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY:

To get a detailed view of the current digital world along with the mal activities happening there and to study the impact of all these upon human psychology as well as lives.

METHODOLOGY:

The investigator has completed the whole paper with self study after analyzing several data. Mostly the secondary sources are used to study the picture of virtusl aspects and the impact of digitalisation upon human world. There are various e-resources, books on cyberpunk, literary texts and science fiction books that have been studied as the secondary source. First of all, the researcher has gone through the e-resources to know the actual picture of the virtual world and the impact of digitalisation upon human world. Then the literary texts and science fictions are used as references to relate and authenticate the keywords and objectives in an overall manner.

OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY:

To get a detailed view of the current digital world along with the mal activities happening there and to study the impact of all these upon human psychology as well as lives.

Here, the investigator tries to fulfill the mentioned objective with the help of secondary data. To fulfill the objective, first of all the social aspects of technology are keenly discussed according to the ongoing. This technical age provides many desirable opportunities which are devoid of morality. People have lots of options at their hands to be entertained with. Most of the time people suck pleasure in such a manner that they cannot even imagine the ghastly outcomes. The digitalization of the present world is such a havoc which starts exploiting the life of people as well as their sentiment just as in a capitalist society. In Marxism, the capitalist society has been defined in a well manner. In capitalism, the state actually uses two strategies to rule people - one is Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), and the other is Repressive State Apparatus(RSA). By these two, the government aims to keep the common people away from releasing their self esteem. Actually, the sole purpose of the state is to manipulate people to consume the cultural goods like mass media, podcasts, broadcasts etc. to benefit capitalism. That means the government is in favour of capitalism. A similar picture is also visible in the present century, where the digital ups and downs lead people to live in a life-in-death condition, better to say in a dystopian condition. So here the actual impacts of the virtual age can be observed clearly. Digitslisation definitely pleases the five sense organs; but actually manipulates the morality of people. In such dystopia, the thought process of people remains out of their grip and thus they get distracted and cannot achieve their desired goal of life. In this dystopia, technology mostly controls the psychology of the people, and people remain in a confused state of mind. This results in different crimes in various social media platforms. All these things actually bring some pessimism in the life of innocent people. After fulfilling the objective of the study and after getting an overall view of the current digital generation, it can be stated that the 21st century is an age of threat and chaos.

ANALYTICAL PERCEPTION:

According to the objective, the collected data are analysed accordingly. For the analysis some major factors of the trending generation are discussed with various examples. Cyberpunk is a major factor of technical innovation that is popular nor only in literature but also in films and other aspects of life also. It is actually one of the subgenres of science fiction that focuses on an artificial futuristic setting which is characterised by lower standard of living with huge technological achievement. Obviously there are some dystopian aspects so far the lifestyle of the people are concerned. People who are living an alienated and secret life and who lack the normal standard of life, naturally would practise some harmful activities with the help of technology. The writers of these genres intend to focus on how technical issues are manifested in lifestyle and how it creates problems for human life. Bruce Sterling, one of the major exponents of cyberpunk literature once said "Google and Facebook don't have "users" or "customers". Instead they have participants under machine surveillance whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos". Another famous writer Fillippo Marinetti in his popular work Manifesto of Futurism bears instances of cyberpunk society. These genres often showcase the drug oriented society from the core. In the context of cyberpunk, the name of cybernetics is worthy to mention. This term was first used by Plato in his Republic to denote the fact that is " the study of self-governance". This quotation is very relevant in this context because despite their independence they are not the governor of their own self. It is handled by the digital infrastructure and people are mesmerized by its workings. Consequently, they become victims of the cyber world. Gradually the subject matter of cyberpunk became very notorious when some people in the present world started to live in a low manner( like that in those cyberpunk fictions) with the accompaniment of modern technology. As a result, inauguration of various other activities like visual pleasure, male gazing, hacking etc take place. The visual pleasure and male gaze - are discussed favorably by the famous theorist Laura Mulvey in the context of movies. These two concepts are correlated to each other. Visual pleasure simply denotes the way females are presented in cinemas in a distorted way only to entertain the male audiences. On the other hand male gaze defines how females are represented from the perspective of male only to evoke the lust of the heterosexual male observers. Actually both visual pleasure and male gaze get entertained by the commodified depiction of female in media-generated world. This is very much related to the practice of pyrography in the visual arts, culture as and also in literature. Consequently this create a hierarchy and devaluates the position of women in the society. Previously this practice was prevalent in television industry mostly ; but later in the current age of internet the practice of visual pleasue spreads like would fire in a different manner with the use of android, windows, desktops platform. Even with sone heinous purpose some criminals use to fit ccTV cameras inside the bedroom, washroom, trial room or hotel rooms for the sake of blackmailing females. Beside these things, there are some popular gaming platforms that use to manipulate the psychology of people very easily that people sometimes use to attempt suicide out of some virtual contacts with those video games. Not only that but also the addiction of these games make youngsters forget the difference between day and night. In such a way technology penetrates the human mind.

Another important fact of digital dystopia is the limitless number of hackers. With the growing notoriety of cyber crimes, it can be easily perceived that the number of hackers is increasing gradually. Hackers are those young people who steal information from people on virtual platforms with the use of high technology. These include stealing media like photos, videos, documents, bank details and other personal information. Whenever a user approaches to download apps , most of the time that person gets notification to allow the particular app to access some personal media. This actually provides a golden opportunity to the hackers who are always peeping through the virtual mode. The users cannot see them. But unfortunately they get trapped by their male activities. Sometimes the hackers steal photos and send videos of the users whenever they are busy in attaining a video call or similar mode of communication. Actually the front cameras of software systems are used maliciously to capture unintentional photos and videos of participants. Their sole purpose is to get money from the citizens. Thus they use to blackmail people by terrifying that their personal information would be circulated worldwide. Eventually they sell those media files in the international market in exchange of money . In the 1980s some adolescent hackers of the US became a huge threat to the social phenomena. In contemporary literature, cinema, science fiction, and everywhere hacking becomes a burning agenda. For instance in the movies like Who Am I (2014) and Snowden (2016) the real picture of hacking is clearly depicted. There is no doubt that these young people have a great understanding of the computer system. But the irony is that they do not sublimate their knowledge in some fruitful innovative works. Rather it is used in ruining the universe.

The virtual platform often provides sublime feelings towards its users. In the Roman classical time, the word 'sublime' had a beautiful connotation. According to Longinus sublime means "lifting out of oneself". Even Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke talked about the idea of sublime. The feeling of sublime is something that is beyond human comprehension. This feeling is both awe and fear stricken which humans possess while looking at the object in front. This leads to thinking about the object or phenomena as superior. Similarly in the context of the 21st century, the renowned academician Vincent Mosco in his famous book The Digital Sublime : Myth, Power, and Cyberspace clearly brings the idea of 'digital sublime' . This is also the unexpressed feeling that a person of the current generation possesses while observing some astonishing programming language on the computer screen. Basically the digital algorithms make the matter more interesting and unique. The algorithms may be considered as the supervisor who instructs the computer system to work accordingly; and people become surprised by the smartness and swiftness of the outcome. The programming is wonderful and impressive that humans often get illusioned by it. Thus it provokes human beings to think higher than themselves. If it is critically studied, then one can find out that the superiority of the machinery system is not harmful until and unless it converts the world into a dystopia. The consumption of digital products contaminates the psychology of people and consequently they start to forget about their genuine potentiality. Thus, this sublimity is not a bane rather a boon to mankind. One thing must be noted that certainly there are some masterminds who work in the backbone of technology and intend to dominate over the whole world.

Last but not the least, the core fact of the current age is the emergence of artificial intelligence. This is actually the vital point of this paper because the elements like cyberpunk, cybernetics, virtual reality, digital sublime and the act of hacking - all these are the mere effects of it. Intelligence is something that is present only in humans. It is an inborn feature of them that gradually sharpens when it is used. Intelligence prepares humans to face challenges in life and also to overcome them effectively. This intelligence is the very opposite of artificial intelligence (for instance Google AI). Artificial intelligence is one of the major fields of study through the use of machine learning; where a computer system gives assignments to humans and they have to fulfil those tasks accordingly. Basically it saves the time that is usually consumed in a classroom setting. But factually this method is very harmful as it orients the five senses as well as the brains of humans so much towards itself. As a result people get attached to it hours after hours. The online examinations, live classroom, webinars etc. are the very burning examples of this.In this system of study, the students cannot invest their creativity nor can they use their limbs fully to learn wholeheartedly. The computer system is structured in such a manner that it acts like an educator cum examiner and students are bound to obey the instructions after sitting infront of it for a longer period of time. As an artificial platform it literally ruins the eyesight and also creates a barrier in learning from nature(which is most important). AI prohibits people from thinking independently because it controls the very brain of man and often shifts their attention from their own soul towards the screen. This digital addiction on a regular basis gives birth to other habits like gaming, net surfing even after getting relief from the learning classes. Most importantly, the these virtual efficiencies slowly give rise to cyber crimes. The practice of IA bring in mind one of the famous science fiction short stories namely The Fun They Had by Isaac Asimov in which the little girl Margie uses to learn concepts through the computer very passively. She actually lacks the passion within her. In that story it is clearly stated that once in the past the students used to learn from outside. But now they lack those fun. Similarly, in the current ultra modern world people are engaged in computerised learning. But in that case the brain is gradually becoming paralysed for not investing its power. Brain not only teaches but also provokes creative thoughts. It helps people to nurture self retrospection as well as self introspection. That is why, AI is an obstacle for the creative development of the self. This whole mechanical system is enough to transform humans into mechanical dolls whose control key is at the hand of virtual anarchy and the result is dystopia.

DISCUSSION:

The main theme of this paper may be discussed as follows-

The digitalisation of the world through various innovative applications on the virtual platform has turned the 21st century into a paralysed universe. The control is obviously at the hand of technology and virtual reality. In such a world humans are almost handicapped. The main reason is that their super ego (morality principle) is governed by their id (pleasure principle). The vaulting ambition of them has destroyed the syntactical order of the society, which results in several cyber crimes and degeneration of human beings. People start to forget their genuine human qualities as well as values. In order to make the whole world globally connected (global village) technology is misused at a high level. In one word people are devoid of self control and empathy. Day by day they are loosing optimism and suffers from existential crisis. All these are the impacts of industrial revolution, artificial intelligence and cyber practices.

FINDINGS :

The current 21st century is full of maladies. But where there are maladies, there are also some remedies for it. The ancient Indian books like Bhagavadgita, Vedas etc. are the true medicine in that case. These are full of moral solutions and a proper critical reading of them will definitely yield some fruit. Once, Swami Vivekananda said that the Western world suffers from the lack of spirituality. Here the entire world is suffering from the dystopian setting caused by digital platforms. In this case also, the proper way out is to consume the following lines of The Upanishads :

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih.(433-44)

These two famous lines became so popular that the modernist writer T. S. Eliot prescribed them as medicine in his monumental work The Waste Land.

Thus it can be concluded that everything in an excessive amount is equal to poison intake - be it food or the habit of digital platforms. It is not possible to avoid virtual creation or to restore the natural order of life, but at least human beings can perform self limitation, self realisation and most importantly self actualisation to find out some alternative path to sustain their existence.

REFERENCES:

1. Sterling, Bruce. The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things. Strelka Press, 2014.

2. Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture : Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. The Athlone Press, 2000.

3. Asimov, Isaac. The Best of Isaac Asimov. Doubleday, 1974.

4. Longinus. On the Sublime. Createspace Independent, 2017.

5. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. RHUK, 2004.

6. Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Kessinger Publishing Co, 2003.

7. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four : A Novel. Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2021.

8. Mosco, Vincent. The Digital Sublime : Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. MIT Press, 2004.

9. Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Grin Publishing, 2008.

WEBLOGRAPHY:

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org

2. https://web1.nbed.nb.ca

3. https://www.britanica.com

4. https://www.goodreaders.com

5. https://www.enotes.com

6. https://www.poetryfoundation.org

Received on 22.04.2022 Accepted on 24.06.2022

Int. J. Tech. 2022; 12(2):53-57.

DOI: 10.52711/2231-3915.2022.00010