In the age of advanced information technology, we have been partially living in the virtual world, the world of digital reality. Humanity has habituated itself to live as someone else, allowing us to create multiplicities of existence when we are in public as well as in private.
Since the penetration of high-speed internet, private space doesn’t remain private anymore. While being our own self, we also tend to be public by transmitting us digitally and connecting us to the public. Be it social media forums such as Facebook or Instagram, streaming websites such as Netflix, or the gaming arena of Pub-G, these platforms bring the public to one’s own room or instrument. From ordering food online, working from home or maybe having online lectures, the distinction between my public and private space has diminished a lot.
This proves the point that Marxist scholar David Harvey makes about the new form of capitalism supplemented with advance information technology, known as the “compression of time and space”. With the ushering in of the Jio phenomenon in India, the usual divide between having something or not having it, majorly in terms of information, has vastly increased and penetrated within the masses. Almost everyone has access to the internet, democratising things in one way.
The phenomenon of public-private has vanished, during the times of COVID-19 crisis. This isolation is not impacting the people until they are vulnerable because of the phenomenon of digitalisation. But the stage of bare life, in words of Agamben, will arrive soon, and has already arrived for a certain class of people who are detached from the minimum existential needs of humanity. It will come for all of us if this calamity doesn’t stop, if people don’t stop moving around and start taking things seriously. The seriousness of quarantine has still not affected many, but we don’t know what time has for us.