Social networks do not help the environment
The information spread through social networks fosters a sense of respect for the environment that is illusory, being a sophisticated makeup that conceals the true intentions: personal satisfaction and relief of conscience, told recently psychologist Ricardo Trujillo. He said that the illusion to return nature, to peace and balance, is based on an erroneous definition of the environment, "because nature has nothing balanced".
The academic from the Faculty of Psychology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) said that well-intentioned ideas about responsible consumption in social networks "are really a simulacrum", an ephemeral act to alleviate the conscience of a society whose immovable economic model hinders any possibility of change. "The capitalist society continues to have externalities and finally we can recycle, change, improve, but the pollution system is not only based on what is generated in the houses, but in the industry," he said.
The teacher in psychology added that although actions such as the consumption of organic products, the purchase of biodegradable packaging or posting a photo of a species at risk of extinction, is finally contributing to a consumption - whether responsible or not - of which it feeds the society of capital. To prove this argument, he referred to the device by which this information is spread -the cellphone- which generates "a huge amount of pollutants". To really avoid the overexploitation of the environment, therefore, would suppose "to deconstruct all that industrialized capitalist system that is around and, probably, society would not agree with it". Certainly not.
In this critical line, the researcher called to observe science as a discipline that has always gone hand in hand with production systems. "It must be made clear that science is not defined to create a better society, it is defined to create a system of production and greater consumption," he said, expressing later that many of the subsidized investigations are approved if they have a commercial purpose. For Trujillo, the information poured into the networks "does not produce social events, but information that is “exchanged" in a market that rewards with personal satisfaction and relief of conscience.
Sharing content of a responsible nature "generates a social identity" that defines the user in a cybernetic environment as someone theoretically healthy and responsible in "the society of the show that Instagram, Facebook and other platforms have created”. “It is a process of consumption and at the same time what generates are vain and superficial social identities," said the specialist. As for the psychological link between the human being and nature, the expert delved into that the latter is seen as a kind of "lost mother" who is missing, and which is treated well from time to time to scare to guilt. Even if for the majority the words of the psychologist could seem harsh, the truth is that time has run out to save the environment. And the recent planet of social networks is doing nothing in preventing it.