01:00 PM
Monday, January 23, 2023
Books – Masrawy:
The book “The City of a Billion Opinions” by Mohamed Abdel-Rahman was recently published by Dar “Don” for publishing and distribution, in conjunction with the Cairo International Book Fair in its 54th session, to be held from January 25 to February 6.
In each chapter, the book deals with behaviors that have turned into digital diseases, such as fragmentation, delusion, plagiarism, emptiness, pastism, and alienation, resulting from the control of the algorithms of social media platforms that were devised by a person like us, but they escape from his hands and become the ones that control those who hold those screens and even in makers if necessary.
The phenomenon is global, but the author seeks to monitor its Egyptian and Arab effects. The chapters of this book try to review the most widespread of them. They are inorganic social diseases, so these pages are not concerned with the pain and variables that afflict the human body due to the frequent use of mobile phones, but rather with the psychological and societal distortions that afflict individuals and then societies due to excessive submission to social media platforms.
In each chapter, writer Mohamed Abdel Rahman pauses in front of a “digital disease” caused by communication platforms. He analyzes its current features and roots in the pre-Internet era, and how different platforms contributed to its spread, as if we were in an extended pandemic, but it is a multi-virus pandemic such that if a person escaped from the first, the second would attack him and pursue him. the third and so on ad infinitum.
In the chapters of this book, the reader finds an explanation of the situations and personalities he encountered digitally and suffered from without knowing an original reason for that suffering, or perhaps the reader himself is not satisfied with his own behavior through these platforms and does not know where to stop. There are also signs in the book that indicate the beginning of the path of change for the better. .
Mohamed Abdel Rahman is a journalist and art critic. He has written many articles analyzing the impact of social media on public opinion. He was the editor-in-chief of a number of television programs and websites. He presented many workshops and courses in digital journalism, as well as studying art criticism.
He published “Book Zero” behind the scenes of journalistic work in February 2018, and the book “Block Philosophy” in June 2021, during which he analyzed the behavior of social media users, and the changes that would not have occurred except in light of the merger of cyberspace with real life.
