A Digital Prison?

What is the world coming to? Have we sold our souls to the world wide web? In danger of sounding reactionary, I must voice some concerns about today’s society.

Let’s face it: cultural activities aren’t highly ranked these days. We live in a thoroughly materialistic world, everything is about wealth and consumerism. The few people, who want something more — or something different, have but one choice. They must find a way to override society. In a way, that forces them to forget about being creative. Is the only option getting stinking rich? It’s hardly an option as there are too many stinking rich people already. One can be certain that they don’t want to share their spare cash.

What happened? Why did this major shift towards materialism occur? It could be a question of technology. Look around, everybody has a mobile, a tablet or a laptop — or all of the above. Many invest in ‘smart’ home robotic vacuum cleaners as well as fancy machines to do every possible household activity. A lot of these appliances have their reason and function, which is well and good. All the same, there are clear borders between sensible and going technology mad. That is only one side of the problem though. It gets ominously apparent that, the more it develops, more people get addicted to the web, to their smartphones, their tablets. These days, it isn’t unusual that people don’t chat. They’re too busy watching their feeds.

Make no mistake: I adore the social media. It is a great way connect for social as well as business purposes. But there’s no doubt it can be overdone. Do we want to become zombies who only live through our smart-phones? Do we want to change all personal contacts for digital counterparts? Is that the kind of life we want?

These are valid questions. There must be something wrong, when two individuals sit across from one another, both deep in digital exchange. What’s the purpose of sitting together in this way? Each person isolated in a virtual world. People can get involved in major incidents through being unable to take their eyes off their screens. Meaning, there must be times, when it is better to be up, close and personal. Once we can manage to separate digital, virtual, and real, we will stop being slaves of our machines. Some people fear robots. In a way, there’s no need for that. Through our digital habits, we’re close to becoming our own robots. In other words, shut down the virtual media from time to time.

 

© HMH, 2018


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2 responses to “A Digital Prison?”

  1. Lucinda E avatar

    I am aware if this problem, but I do find I can chat more easily to people on line than the few I meet day to day as those virtual friends are also writers and book marketers and we have a lot more in common.

    1. Hanne H avatar
      Hanne H

      You have a point, Lucinda. I am in a similar situation with regards to virtual writer friends, but I believe that has something to do with living in Germany but writing in English. I don’t know whether it would be any different if I was in an English speaking land.

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