The operating theatre was cold as always. Two women lying, unconscious, on separate tables with their bodies cut open and a trust that they were being taken care of. When someone in that room reached for a phone and pressed record. Flashing victory signs, rooting for both doctors, challenging them to close first, that video showcasing the gamification of the C-section procedure at Lady Willingdon Hospital went viral.
The Medical Superintendent and the Head of Gynaecology were suspended. PEMRA issued warnings shortly after. Now that the news cycle has faded, the question still lingers — how did no one in that room, even for a moment, see the sheer cruelty of this documentation?
As of January 2025, Pakistan has 66.9 million social media users, which are only increasing each year with affordable smartphones and accessible internet connections — surpassing serious conversations around consent and ethical use of digital media. People have moved past living in the moment to posting everything live as content. Documentation is now natural to people in every phase of their lives, raising questions on how far they are willing to go in the pursuit of being seen.
Madiha Khan, a Behavioural Sciences Researcher at NUST and a Fulbright scholar from Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, described this mechanism as an act of outsourcing memory to an external device, which does not allow the brain to encode the experience itself. In her email interview, she said, “The recording becomes a proxy for living the moment.” In that operating room, she explained that the recording reorganised the staff’s attention — “shifting the experience from something that is lived to something that has to be performed,” she said.
The gamification of the process especially gave empathy a backseat as the need to belong drove the behaviour. “The patients stopped being people to be cared for and became props,” she said. Hence, the staff did not just document the moment; they reframed it.
Social media and the internet have amplified the scale at which one can grow an audience and make attention measurable. Khan said in her interview that, according to research, social validation activates the same neurological reward system as food or physical pleasure. Social media platforms are not neutral spaces, but mechanisms that are trained to reward attention and anticipation. This becomes a routine for its users. “Our emotional response has been dulled by the constant intake of information,” she said. These feedback loops rewire brain structure in ways people do not consciously consider.
Rubban Shakeel, a media studies lecturer at NUST, in his email interview, was direct about the broader effect of these structures. “It turns everything into a competition, and nothing good comes of making your life one where you compete for attention,” he said. The problem lies within the conceptual misunderstanding of online media as a friendly space.
People at times feel that I’m withholding my life from them just because I’m not posting everything I do
“Many influencers have gotten physically harmed and murdered because someone online figured out where they live and what their routine is,” said Shakeel. This is where oversharing carries physical consequences — beyond neuroplasticity.
Rimaal, aged 20, a mass communication student at NUST and a content creator, has over five thousand followers. During the interview, she showed high awareness of digital spaces and their complexities. For her, posting has never been about performance, but rather intentional sharing of certain experiences. “My account isn’t a highlight reel, it’s more like controlled chaos,” she said. “The moment it starts feeling like a responsibility, it stops being fun.”
If any of her content includes people who do not want to be on the internet, she discards those posts. She believes the boundary between private and public life must be respected among trends and virality. The controversy around Rajab Butt also displays the blurred lines of private and public life. Much of his marriage and other personal milestones carried millions as an audience. Months later, his separation became the new consumable narrative across social media. Butt acknowledged in a podcast that it “should have stayed private.” Yet by then, the entire marital cycle had become a part of the digital spectacle.
However, online performance no longer remained confined to audience reaction alone. On her morning show, Fiza Ali shared what she described as a “spontaneous family moment” with her husband, leading to widespread criticism and memes.
PEMRA issued a formal show-cause notice to 24 News, the channel that broadcast Fiza Ali’s morning show. Most times, personal expression curated specifically for virality clashes with institutional regulation and can evolve into matters of public scrutiny and governance.
With reach and visibility regarded as the measure of relevance, even accountability becomes content. Shakeel, in his interview, mentioned the need for careful content distribution that is ethical and stands for public interest. “We need regulations for online media to ensure the same principles apply to social media platforms that news outlets consider as their Bible,” Shakeel said. A controversial behaviour has the potential to become normal once the public starts believing in it.
For those choosing not to participate at the same pace, there is a different social cost. Aamina Afsar, aged 20, is an avid social media user based in Islamabad. She highlights the friction that comes with reduced online presence and how it allows her to live in the moment more fully. “It does make me a little self-conscious of how I look, though,” she said in her interview.
This social tension prevails among youth nowadays. “People at times feel that I’m withholding my life from them just because I’m not posting everything I do.” Being a media student, she is aware of the pull factor of these platforms, which makes her more intentional about limiting her presence.
Even then, there lies a gap that goes beyond individual choice. “In Pakistan, people rarely ask for consent while filming in public,” says Afsar. Shakeel and Khan have both identified this gap in awareness and action as a structural issue. “Expecting individuals to make ethical decisions without proper policy and implementation is impractical,” Shakeel says. Regulations are essential and need to be clarified and enforced for any society to function effectively.
The most unsettling aspect of all this is how desensitisation and familiarity shape our emotional responses smoothly before we even process the content. “The Lady Willingdon video was filmed in vertical phone format – the same format used for recipes, memes, and daily routines,” said Khan.
This signalled to each viewer that this is a casual and shareable video before processing the content. Cultures that traditionally regarded the body, marriage and grief as private now use these exact taboos to attract attention and judgement. Khan says that content now shared openly was once most strictly controlled. The medium of judgement has changed, but the dynamic has not.
Rimaal, watching other creators cross boundaries, offered the simplest summary. “Just because you can post anything doesn’t mean you should,” she said. “There is a difference between being bold and being careless.” In Pakistan, and beyond, this sentence should be obvious. It just needs to be heard.