As always, thoughtful, insightful words from Not Buying Anything.
Where has the real world gone, are we now afraid to be alone with our thoughts, after all thoughts are a good way of finding direction in our life. Face to face communication can be a wonderful enriching experience. Yes, there way be a place for "social media" but as part of our life, it shouldn't become our life, and that, unfortunately seems to be the trend.
This from Not Buying Anything:
Oliver Sacks, British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author, feared for the future before he died. He wasn't so much alarmed at what had come into being. Rather, he was shocked by how much was missing.
“Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases.
There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media.
Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently.
They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.”
Oliver Sacks died in 2015. Before he passed he wrote,
"I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself.
Sacks wouldn't have advised looking for such answers, such peace, in a mobile screen.
We are trapped in a virtual world. I have doubts about it providing us with a "good and worthwhile life".
The problem is not the tool. The problem is who owns it and with what purpose it is used. In the hands of capitalism all the tools are, sooner or later, harmful to all.
ReplyDelete