Clueless 2021 

The pandemic has been a great challenge for most but for online retail giants such as Amazon, it has been somewhat of a blessing. Since the start of the pandemic, online shopping has skyrocketed with people spending more and more of their time in front of screens, locked out of shops and barred from physical social situations. The result? A virtual shopping mall of shared data, links, reduced prices, flashing often unnecessary products and disguised advertisement . We pass through this virtual mall daily, allowing its merchants to snatch our limited attention any time we log on, often causing us to forget why we logged on in the first place. We have become bait as this drastic shift to ecommerce has also opened up new doors for fraudsters and scams, which many are not always equipped to identify. I myself have fallen for such a scam at the start of the pandemic last year. 

On the surface, times may have changed a lot since the 1995 release of 'Clueless', a classic American teen film about a popular, shallow, rich teenage girl in Beverly Hills who after a fall from grace comes to realise how misguided and clueless she was. But I can't help questioning, has it really changed that much? Or are we just as clueless if not more so in how we spend our time, our money and where we place our attention? Perhaps next time we stroll through the internet we should remember...

"It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's okay. but up close, it's a big old mess." - Cher (Clueless)