SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

It is truly baffling to witness the stark disconnect between various digital platforms, especially during a national crisis. Even as the state finds itself embroiled in a military conflict on the frontier, the digital landscape suggests we are living in separate universes.

If one were to rely solely on the often unhinged world of X (formerly Twitter), the gravity of the situation is unavoidable. Yet, a mere swipe away, Instagram operates in a state of blissful suspended animation. And then there is LinkedIn. While the rest of the world watches the front lines with bated breath, the “thought leaders” of LinkedIn are busy extracting ‘synergy’ from tragedy. And on Facebook, people just can’t stop “sending prayers” or “marking [themselves] safe”, sometimes even when they are nowhere near the catastrophe.

To illustrate this surreal divide, I recently looked at how the conflict between Pakistani forces and the Afghan Taliban panned out on X and Instagram. When I shared some updates related to the conflict on my Instagram, the responses were an exercise in profound ‘news-blindness.’

The overwhelming majority asked, "What is this about?" It is clear that, for this segment, traditional news websites are relics of a bygone era. It seemed that Instagram folk inhabit a space where the state’s military involvement was less relevant than a celebrity’s latest divorce or a “slow living” reel during Ramazan.

From Instagram’s aesthetic amnesia to X’s algorithmic hysteria, social media platforms have stripped away the concept of a common public square and have fractured collective awareness

There is a strange irony here, though. While the average ‘Instagrammer’ was largely oblivious to a border war, they are remarkably vocal about local civic decay, such as the dangers of potholes in their neighbourhoods. This highlights a bizarre digital myopia. As the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues through his “Information Cocoons” theory, we no longer share a common public square. Instead, we reside in conceptual realities where a geopolitical event simply does not exist if it cannot be woven into a personal micro-narrative.

The American writer Eli Pariser famously termed this the "Filter Bubble." On a visually driven platform such as Instagram, the algorithm is a curator of ‘vibes’. It actively suppresses hard news to protect the user’s mood, ensuring they remain in a digital bubble of lifestyle content. Pariser demonstrated this years ago by showing how two different users searching for "Egypt" on Google during the Arab Spring were shown two different worlds: one saw a political upheaval, the other saw a holiday brochure.

This fragmentation is what the American political scientist Shanto Iyengar calls "affective polarisation." It is no longer just a disagreement over facts. It is a total divergence of experience. X users are primed for the adrenaline of the ‘breaking’ report, while Instagram users are primed for aesthetic tranquillity. This creates what French sociologist Jean Baudrillard described as "hyperreality”. A brunch, the sunset or the ‘fit check’ on Instagram becomes more real than a war. A conflict lacks ‘semiotic value’ because it cannot be framed as an aspirational post.

However, while Instagram largely remains blissfully oblivious to the Pak-Afghan conflict, the platform miraculously found its pulse the moment the US and Israel turned their sights on Iran. Suddenly, the feeds of Pakistani users on Instagram were saturated with ‘war’ footage. But most of it was fabricated or wildly exaggerated, and almost all of it curated with the obligatory 'emotional' soundtrack to ensure maximum engagement.

Understandably, one can hardly expect the local Instagram zeitgeist to ignore a conflict in which missile and drone strikes begin to disturb the shopping vistas of the UAE. In the hierarchy of online empathy, a threat to a holiday haven or a business hub will always trump the messy realities of the frontier.

After all, who in the cosmopolitan Instagram sphere actually cares about the geography of Kandahar, Miranshah or Spin Wam? The fact that Pakistan remains locked in a bloody struggle with a neighbour that persistently exports suicide bombers is apparently far too provincial a concern for the ‘globally-minded’ Instagram ‘influencer’.

X, on the other hand, has become a digital battleground for the “algorithmic mob.” It is often bloated with ‘propaganda wars’ that have shaped their own parallel universe. In this universe as well, many have plunged into conceptual reality because the empirical reality is not what they would want it to be like.

As the Middle East went up in flames, X, naturally, became a sprawling space packed with fake news and recycled combat footage. Yet, far more surreal were the performative gymnastics of the ‘progressive’ vanguard and the ever-present Imran Khan devotees.

On cue, the usual lexicon of 'colonialism', 'imperialism' and 'human rights' was dusted off for the occasion. The trouble is, pointing out the obvious hypocrisies of the US and Israel, framed in high-minded political contexts acquired at expensive Western universities, has lost its edge. It is about as original as a dial-up connection.

Nor do the poetic laments for the 'sanctity of life' provide much relief, especially when, ironically, they conclude with hysterical demands for Pakistan to plunge headlong into a Gulf war. Apparently, we must rush to the aid of an “anti-imperialist” ally. Isn’t Pakistan already embroiled in conflicts against India and its proxies in Afghanistan?

In 1986, the American social philosopher Guy Oakes wrote that political romantics reduce everything to “aesthetic contemplation.” The purpose of this is to trigger “elevating experiences.” For example, they poeticise conflicts. According to Oakes, they do this not to resolve conflicts. Instead, they see it as an occasion “for the evocation of an emotionally satisfying mood and an aesthetic opportunity.”

Then, inevitably, there is the 'Imran Khan is the only solution' brigade. For these stalwarts, no geopolitical or local catastrophe can be permitted to eclipse the messianic and entirely self-referential ‘struggle’ of the ‘Great Leader.’ If the world is ending, it is merely a sub-plot in the epic of the Khan.

We seem to have reached a stage where on one app the ultimate existential crisis is a coffee shop refusing to add almond milk to a flat white, or where the state is allowed to collapse provided the dust from the rubble doesn't settle on a brunch-time reel. On another app, the 'enlightened' and the 'devoted' trade blows in displays of performative outrage. Here, the end of the world is merely a trending hashtag.

While Instagram sleeps in a curated haze of aesthetic indifference, X screams into a void of its own making, convinced that a revolution is just around the corner, even as it gleefully cheers for a war in a distant land that it only understands through the ‘news’ of its own choosing.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 8th, 2026