Connecting with other people
should be easier now than ever, what with us having handheld devices on us most
of the time, and access to all sorts of social media imaginable. These things
were designed to bring us all together, but the ironic reality is they’ve
somehow succeeded in founding a generation of individuals that increasingly
spend their time isolated in a bubble of digital distraction, cut off from the
world around them and everyone in it.
I recently spotted a young
family sat having lunch together – well, when I say “together”, they may as
well have been on different continents: The parents (in their late twenties)
were sat in silence staring at their phone screens, and their daughter, who was
no more than 1 or 2, was sat vacant-eyed and glued to her iPad, just totally switched off from her
surroundings.
Now, I’m not naïve enough to preach that
children ought to be kept away from this kind of technology – after all,
depriving youngsters of an acquaintance with things like IPads in this day and
age will unquestionably disadvantage them in later life – but the time they do
spend with it has to be regulated. It
is so easy to plonk your little tot in front of a screen for hours on end to
keep them quiet, but the more you do so the more you’re risking him or her
growing up completely lacking in basic social skills.
Looking around, our modern
generation especially seems to have already become worryingly desensitised,
with little if any empathy for anyone except ourselves and our own; explore the
furthest end of this spectrum, and you
have youngsters that have grown up to be alarmingly hostile towards others and
to anything and everything that’s different from them. Worst of all, we’ve gradually conditioned ourselves
to find all this absolutely normal.
Flash forward to a terrifying
Orwellian society where mankind has evolved an extra flattened edge to the
thumb (ideal for screen swiping) and each of us exists utterly cut off from the
other; suspicious, hostile and totally without compassion or consideration. Ok,
well maybe the thumb thing is a bit excessive (though you NEVER know), but the
rest doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.
Instead of settling for a
vicarious existence through a screen (hey, if you didn’t check in on Facebook,
were you ever really there at all..?), why don’t we all set a precedent for the
future and make a conscious effort to put down our devices a little more often,
go out, and just experience life? Catch up with friends? Laugh? Try something new? I like my thumbs
just the way they are, anyway.
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