We jut can’t get enough of the screens in our lives can we. From the work computer to the home computer, the tablet to the smart-phone. We are surrounded by LCDs, LEDs, OLEDs and what not.
We have, as a people, have become information junkies and these screens are our suppliers, they keep us hooked, whenever we need our fix , we just need to look at them. We keep checking the screens, for new information, some notification from some source, and the information gets old as soon as we look at it, sometimes, without even processing it we just swipe away notifications. Our brains decide within the first few moments whether the notification is important or not, and crave for more soon after.
This obsession with keeping our eyes and minds busy looking at screens has meant, that we almost never have any idle time. The time, that our ancestors used to do the most important thing we have been born to do, think! Where is the time to think in between all this, how can our thoughts develop, how can we form opinions about issues. No, reading an editorial from a big newspaper is not forming an opinion, that’s just agreeing to someone else’s opinion because we ourselves don’t have the time to form our own. What about enjoying nature, to bask in the glorious sun, walk barefoot in the lush green fields, feel the wind in our hair, get soaking wet in the rains pouring down, in fact these days, when it rains, we are more concerned about one of our screens getting wet, rather than enjoying the rain. As the poet W.H. Davies wrote back in 1911 in his poem :
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows.
These lines seem more relevant in today’s times than ever before. We are moving away from nature and getting trapped in these screens of ours. We drool over beautiful pictures of water falls and mountains on Instagram, but don’t take the effort to travel and see these places for ourselves. How can looking at digital pictures of a place ever match up to actually being there, its unfathomable. And worse is, when we actually do travel to a place, rather than enjoying the place itself we are more interested in taking meaningless selfies and sharing them instantaneously with everyone we know. Its almost like the purpose of our visit was to click pictures and share.
Is this what we are? information junkies, addicted to consuming information on our screens. And what will we become in the future, will we ever walk out of our homes, how many days can we go without any connection with nature? And what about human connection? Will we be able to form genuine, warm, relationships with people in such a world dominated by technology. Would we have real conversations with real people or just chats and instant messages with weird user-names.
When Television, the very first screen, was born. It was called an “Idiot box”. People ridiculed it, and terms like “couch potato” came into existence for people who obsessed with it. But it also pioneered a great information revolution that has shaped our current society. Since then, people have not dared to question the advancement of technology and its encroachment into our personal lives. And it has brought us here, in a place where we are obsessed with technology, we keep checking our phones for more notifications, we keep refreshing our mailboxes, we keep logging into facebook in the middle of a work day, staring at the same pictures again and again, the same stupid status updates that mean nothing, the ridiculous check-ins which have no relevance, it never stops, and we never want it to!
We are afraid of getting bored. We have lost the ability to keep our minds busy on our own, and we are substituting that with more useless information. And with things like smart-watches, and the Google Glass of-course, we will have these screens slapped onto our bodies as well. Imagine, a screen always on your eye, feeding you with information all the time, right from when you wake up in the morning till you sleep at night for some shut-eye. It will be like an endless supply for a helpless addict. All the time will be Screen time. And when people will stare at stars in the night sky, the screen will tell them what they are called and what constellations they belong to, how far they are from earth, and how long will it take to reach there on a spaceship. The beauty of the twinkling star will be lost, forever!!!
This post first appeared on medium
No comments:
Post a Comment