(11) Searching for Attention Creates Digital Zombies (DZs): Rising content and super abundant social media and broadcast channels have enslaved children to narcissism and hedonism. Contemporary society is heavily mediated by digital gadgets like mobile phones. Children with a mobile phone are alone in a crowd. They live in a silo in public as well as in the privacy of their bedrooms, where they are moronically glued to their screens and re-emerge as DZs like the undead.
A ‘Digital Zombie’ is a person using digital technology and/or social media to the point that it takes control of their life for the worse, to the point that they become fixated only on that faux reality. In the process, DZs have carved out their own niche. Andrew Campbell expressed concerns over whether or not the individual can truly live a full and healthy life while they are preoccupied with the digital world. These DZs present a cold and meaningless physical appearance in the presence of their parents.
The DZs lose moments to love, connect, and care for others when its attention is extracted for profit. For the DZs, the thesis of Warm Bodies might not sound so far-fetched. DZs are walking disasters, courting unnecessary risks to their lives, and have now become a source of light-hearted entertainment for television viewers. Thousands of CCTV cameras for traffic enforcement and surveillance installed in and around shopping centres, malls, and residential streets have built up a hilarious stock of footage of the misadventures, stumbles, and follies of these DZs who, fixated by their gadgets and connected to the virtual or web world, test their invincibility by mindlessly walking in front of moving vehicles. Digital zombies collide against pillars, lamp posts, shop windows, knock over pedestrians, fall into potholes, and startle happily sleeping dogs on the pavements.
(12) Speed over Accuracy: A handbook by the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism found that 56 percent of people in the US and 49 percent of people in the UK believe that journalists prioritise speed over accuracy to compete with social media platforms. Huang et al. ‘s (2016) study found that social media can increase the speed at which information is disseminated while also speeding up the spread of misinformation and the amplification of biased perspectives. The research also indicated that more than half of the respondents in both countries were concerned about the reliability of news on social media platforms. These findings highlight the need for media organisations to prioritise accuracy and reliability over speed. [NEXT – More Challenges]