No longer browsing through holiday photo albums, or sitting down to send hand-written letters any more. Everyone seems to have already switched to faster, weirder and less personal ways of entertainment, communication and business.
If you were to talk with your great grand-father and tell him about your daily life, he would either laugh at you in pity (that’s not a life son, is a screen-bound prison), or prevent you from coming back to our bleak, impersonal present altogether. Would he be right?
Of course the Internet has improved our quality of life:
- Better task management (home and business)
- Freedom to make smarter consumer choices; from flight tickets to baby milk coupons
- Free (or cheap) access to knowledge, information and education opportunities
- Outsourcing work for making one’s business sustainable
- New ways of entertainment, communication and self-expression
But as with everything new and shiny, there’s a hidden, crippling downside:
- Forsaking the ‘personal’ quality of communication and socializing
- Withdrawing and becoming addicted to new forms of entertainment that are unhealthy
- Uncontrollability of the information circulating and their validity
- Switching to a bleaker, less humane reality
There’s no right or wrong opinion when it comes to the Internet. We can all agree however how inevitably, and perhaps irretrievably, our lives have changed.
This summer I’m liking life instead
This summer I'm liking life instead
You no longer talk on the phone, you just text everyone. We don’t get to hang out, we do video calls, we don’t play, we watch others do it.
What makes some Internet skeptics a little hopeful is that as with every grand, evolutionary development, people react to it eventually.
It might take us a while to realize its harmful effects, as we are all so deeply immersed and intoxicated by its admittedly many and versatile advantages.
But there will be a time when we’ll realize how life is more than your tablet, or my it-does-everything-but-cook smartphone.
A time when we’ll finally figure out how life won’t wait for you to tweet about it, life is in the fleeting moment you opt to text or tweet about something. We’re living a meta-life, where all we do is talk about life (the one we’re supposed to be living).
Being a slave to technology might make us more efficient and powerful, but it can’t help but rob us off of our humanity and that quality we call ‘life’. Not many have the privilege of having a life, so better use yours wisely. The Internet has such great potential, which is probably the reason why it sometimes outsmarts people.
We’re humans, let’s keep it that way.