Over the years we have acquired many tools, which become revolutionized in their time. Also through the years they have lost their value or are not seen as a great invention in the world, nowadays the world changes too fast that it is too difficult to keep up. In consequence this leads us to think or ask what is technology, how we define it and what is its role in the world or for people who use it whether they want it or not. There is no doubt that technology can no longer disappear or us stop using it, we have become addicted to it.
The Allegory of the Cave, is a story very famous for its metaphorical way of seeing life before society that from that time reflected ignorance to beyond knowledge. Today these can be seen everywhere and that is thanks to social media that allow us to have access to too much information that is sometimes difficult to process or understand and also exposes us to new ways of sharing knowledge or ideas. This can free us from our chains or resign ourselves to living in the shadows.
Allegory is a metaphor that tries to explain the idea(thought) sought. We can define the allegory as a series of metaphors linked together, which explain with different words an idea to be understood in the context. An allegory is a text that has a hidden meaning. The meaning behind this is usually moral. In an allegory, the characters often symbolize a concept or idea of real life.
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Examples of allegory, try to reveal a truth or idea through various types of metaphors. The allegory of the cave of Plato is an analogy (comparison between two things) about the reality of our knowledge. Plato creates the allegory of the cave to show in a figurative sense how life chains us, and put us looking towards the wall of a cave, since we are born, and how the shadows we see reflected on the wall make up our reality.
In the allegory of the cave, men are held chained from the day that they were born to a cave. Where all they see are the shadows reflected in the wall of the cave and some exterior noises that are creating reality from what they are feeling . One of the prisoners finally gets rid of the chains and goes out to the outside world, learning and knowing about ‘the reality’ when the free man returns to the cave to free his imprisoned friends, nobody listens to him, and they accuse him of being a liar.
Here we are going to try to understand the myth according to the human nature. The myth tells about men chained, from their birth, in a cave turned to a wall where they only see shadows and some noise from the outside. The image they describe leads us to the nature of the prisoner who lives to the extent that he is inserted in a kind of sensitive world captured through the senses that generates certain types of values. The knowledge of oneself through the shadows shows us the identification of human reality with respect to the physical and with respect to our body in general.
The myth continues with the release of one of the men with chains in the cave. The discovery of the real world is slow and confusing. The prisoner freed when he turns around, the first thing he discovers is the bonfire in the cave and the prisoners creating the shadows of his reality. The exit of the prisoner from the cave would be the real journey towards reality. The eyes of man, who never saw sunlight, hurt and fail to distinguish the shapes of things.
The sun in the allegory of the cave represents good. The good for Plato, is so difficult to define that compares it with the sun. It is the principle of existing things, the principle of knowledge. Without light we cannot see the things, and without the good or knowledge we cannot grasp (understand) the other ideas. Inside the cave the sun is the bonfire that allows the prisoners to see the shadows on the wall reflected.
The first thing that he can distinguish after the initial disorientation are the reflections of things, such as the reflection of a tree. The free man begins to recognize the objects of the cave and the objects of the external world and provokes a moral and intellectual liberation of the soul from the bonds and limitations offered by the sensible world (where we live, and we have created). Thus he ascends towards the world of ideas through the practice of philosophy (the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence).
This assent from the sensible world to the world of ideas is a search for knowledge that derives from the philosophy that identifies human reality with the soul. After the man is free from bondage, he becomes a kind of philosopher and feels a duty to liberate others. For that reason he returns to the cave to give his knowledge to the still prisoners but these do not believe in his truth, they treated him as he was crazy.
Per example, we could say that education is the cavern that is only capable of projecting ‘shadows’ of reality, which are only appearances. The students have a low academic level, leave incapacitated to exercise a good career. The education system and knowledge must be hand to hand, but apparently, this is not the case in many cases, hence this leads the division between both aspects.
But would the ‘light’ be capable of breaking those chains? Knowledge is capable to defeat the ignorance, it has the ability to ‘enlighten’ our understanding of things (according to the type of knowledge) and thus, face the reality and overcome most of the obstacles that the same reality puts in front of us. Something like ‘social media’.
Today we can enjoy some of the things that technology has created. First was the electricity, then the transistor, the computer, the internet, then the smart phone that brought the famously knows as “apps”. One of these applications is called ‘social media’, social media has revolutionized our era, for some people it has been for a beneficial good, while other people complain about it. The truth is that everyone judges it according to their own experience.
Just like the man in the cave, sometimes we want to discover new things by using the social media. Some people have gotten the best out of it and have found what they had been looking for. One of those things that they have found is the love of their life. Today we see all the people working or doing some other activity and because of that they do not have time for themselves and a way to socialize with people or get their other half, therefore, they are using social media applications, where they can meet people from Different countries, different traditions, different personalities, they have the opportunity to chat with that person, if they wish or maybe they want to know more about a certain person. There are people who have traveled long distances to meet that special person and who have married and formed a family together thanks to the use of this technology.
For other people where distance is a barrier, social media has cut this distance and has brought families closer. Many people have the opportunity to live with or close to their families which does not allow them to miss their loved ones, but for others who for different reasons cannot be with their families, social media has allowed them to somehow be “together’. Through these applications people are able to maintain some contact with their families in their day to day and follow them through their post that they maintain during their day. When they write something in their profiles you can know about their moods or thoughts (although sometimes it is not true) that they are having at that moment, when they publish a photo we can see how they dress, how they change over time and make them feel as if they had been with them all that time. This is similar just like the shadows in the wall, we know that is not real but it feels like if it were. Sometimes we are prisoners of our own actions, goals, dreams and this keep us apart from the family.
In some other cases, social media has served to organize and help people with each other. In natural disasters we have seen how people are left uncommunicated and do not have access to information that helps them to obtain basic necessities or information that allows them to find a safe place. Thanks to social media that allow to have an almost immediate information that allows to report events that are happening at that precise moment and speeds up the help in a much faster and more orderly manner. For example, in natural disasters such as an earthquake, these types of events occur without prior notice and in different types of places. When this happens many people are trapped in buildings, many people feel the uncertainty of not knowing about their relatives, their pets and feel powerless to not be able to do anything. Social media has helped spread news and valuable information such as; places of collection centers, shelters for victims, information of people and animals found, places where people are needed to remove debris, even social media helps to send our location (such as WhatsApp) to be located and receive a faster medical treatment if injured. In this case social media can be seen as the prisoner that came back to help the others prisoners. When you give the social media (knowledge) the correct use, many forms of aid are revealed in front of us.
But the overuse of technology that we have been seen in the last years on the Society have been very diverse. As a result, this has divided people and have a different vision according to their own experience with it. We use it for different things, it can be to socialize virtually, to advertise some business or product, or just to pass the time. But it has a downside, some use it to hurt people emotionally, sell fake products, or scam persons.
With free access to social media, and with the advantage of having a name and a fake profile photo, many people have given different types of use. One of them is to make fun of or insult a person or group. The causes of this may be; because they do not share the same interests, ideas, sometimes it is only to defend their idols, and some others just to annoy others. The latter are known as trolls. Trolling is defined as creating discord on the Internet by upsetting people by posting off-topic messages in an online community. Basically, a social media troll is someone who purposely says something controversial in order to get a rise out of other users. And this is exactly what Plato was trying to say, how we follow and believe in the shadows that are presented to us, without questioning anything.
In conclusion, we will never know for sure what was the real message that Plato wanted to spread when he wrote the allegory of the cave. We can only speculate and make use of his writings in the way that best suits us, in the same way we use social media. We as humans always want to know, but sometimes we run out answers, we run out questions, therefore we run out of hope and when this happens we create our own beliefs. In Plato’s time there were many gods, and each person worshiped their own ‘true’ god. Now in our times using social media we venerate any person who has that ‘something’ that we want to find, that makes us want it, or we simply sympathize with their work and have admiration for them, and blind us. It can be a musician, writer, politician, philosopher, etc. history has taught us that all the great ‘thinkers’ have only been the object of deceiving many.
