The influence of online social media has significantly presented its
importance in the second decade of 21st century. The twitter and
facebook lead revolutions in middle east have shook the world. Moreover,
big guns tweeting directly on a common person’s computer updating him
every second is another example of revolution. The communication had
never been so effective in human history.
However, recently it was shocking to see an extremism promoting facebook
page with 160K likes. The page is based in Pakistan and is a
representative of the Zaid Hamid type mindset. On the contrary, I could
gather only 98 people on RSOP page in a year of its launch. This was a
very serious construction of an extremist trend accross the internet —
haunting teenagers on online media, promoting intolerance and conspiracy
theories.
There were two things that can be related to this effect. Most of the
people sitting on online media belong to youth group of Pakistan. These
are reactionary teenagers who have been continuously fed up with
conspiracy theories since their inception and whose education is based
upon the literature developed from Nasim Hijazi mindset. They find
reason as an enemy and have been made quite adverse to the notions of
tolerance and moderation. One can find them saying ‘Subhan Allah’ on
every morphed artistic Islamic images of natural objects. And when
someone reasons with them, all of them would be found cursing the person
and issuing political and religious decrees against him. The halfbaked
knowledge and less understanding equipped with stealth armour of
fundamentalism is quite evident from their behaviors.
The sms generation endorses every fake news story, irrational claim and
illogical thought without much ado on the grounds of being religiously
faithful, hence accepting everything they occur to. On the other hand
the makers of this fake information are equally committed and
productive. One can find glorifications of Hitler to Zaid Hamid on these
platforms.
Whereas, the educationists and the moderates term social media as a
waste of time. They are not synchronizing their thoughts with the modern
technological trends due to various reasons. Most of the people are
busy and are limited to
a very small area of influence. They are reluctant to develop an
effective firewall of reason and education in front of online
fraudulents and hate mongers. They are neglecting the influence of
online/social media on the psychological thinking pattern of this naive,
very huge and important group of our society and leaving them a prey to
ZH variants.
We at RSOP have started this online movement to create a contrary and
rational discourse on online media and we invite all the concerned
people to contribute and raise the voice against this bigotry. RSOP
finds it a moral duty of the learned people to educate the neglected
breed in a way that is more effective. For us, this is the call of the
hour.
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