How misery became #misery

My favourite Robin Williams film is 1984's Moscow on the Hudson.

In it, he plays a Soviet-era saxophonist who, while touring the US with a Russian circus defects, only to discover that the American Dream is as illusory as the Marxist Utopia.

Near the end of the film, his character says: "In Russia, I was miserable, but I loved my misery. I could hold it. I could caress it."

The modern world is not short of misery, but over time we have become exposed to a new, insidious form of misery, one we cannot hold or caress, one we can only click: #misery.

There was a profusion of tributes paid to Williams after his suicide; a typical version being something along the lines of "Goodbye 'captain, oh my captain'. We will miss you." And though I do not doubt the sincerity of such messages, I do not know what they amount to in real terms. You are not going to wake up the day after posting and see "The Ghost of Robin Williams likes this" on your Facebook page. Williams's wife and family are not going to read the vast bulk of the messages. We are not "there" for them, we are far away, and we are "here" only while Williams's suicide is "trending".

The tragedy of Williams's death quickly became a #tragedy. First, it supposedly highlighted depression and there was an explosion of columns that followed "the tears of the clown" narrative, then it highlighted Parkinson's, of which Williams was in the early stages.

Now there is debate over whether the medication Williams was taking for Parkinson's spurred his suicide. You cannot hold or caress #misery because it wriggles out of your hands.

We live not in the age of information but the age of too much information or, should I say, tmi. The adage " information is power" is no longer true - now information is disempowerment. We have information but no time to process it, to think.

Social media has reduced tragedy, as it has reduced most things, to entertainment. Everything becomes equiform, be it the Ebola outbreak, Kim Kardashian's baby, Williams's suicide, the Middle East crisis or Miley Cyrus's Grammy performance.

Yes, the Middle East is a form of entertainment, a chance to be morally outraged and to confuse that with being morally right. It is a chance to say hurtful things about Jews/Muslims and to decry how "children are being murdered", as if only one side kills, all the while baying not for peace but for Jewish/Muslim blood. Everything is dumbed down to an emotional impulse. We are limited to our most basic fears and desires. Everything has to be smashed into byte-sized pieces.

What most people know about Ebola, for example, might not constitute three lines. Their "knowledge" of Ebola is probably limited to "it's scary and it looks like it's coming our way".

When people have a cause or a #cause, the only way they feel they can rise above the white noise of all the other causes is by saying something especially stupid and attention-seeking. Cue the Kill Kendall Jones Facebook page. Cue Tony Erenreich's virtual fatwa on the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. This kind of "moral" outrage is a self-pleasing tantrum, an end in itself. It does not progress to a viable solution.

In the late 1950s, the US psychologist Harry Harlow conducted an experiment in which infant macaques were separated from their mothers and made to choose between two surrogates: a cloth mother, offering warmth and comfort, and a wire mother offering nourishment in the form of food and drink. Overwhelmingly, the infants chose the cloth mother, going to the wire mother only when hungry or thirsty.

We speak of the "online community" but it is only a #community. Chimpanzees huddled up in the rain for safety are a community. We are not. The internet could be a portal to greater debate but generally it is not. We search it for online chat rooms, music, movies, pornography, gossip, games, funny pictures of animals and inspirational quotes. There is online entertainment galore, and we mistake this for nutrition, but we never find the thing we most desire from our ubiquitous wire mother: genuine warmth.