I’ve been recently watching a television show by the name “Black Mirror” a Netflix original, that has a collection of short stories are set in a future dystopia where technology helps us get through every vital part of our lives (if we don’t already do that now.) But it has really struck me how accurate a lot of these episodes would be to reality in the upcoming years; As a society, we have become so reliant and open to different forms of technology before fixing the problem we have at hand. Is it because of the immediate satisfaction that technology can give to us, or that dealing with facing reality can be so pressure/anxiety consuming that it would be easier to do something behind a glass screen.
In the show it goes through different trials of love, death, forgiveness, anger, solitude and so much more but rarely is there an actual human connection, but just a artificial connection to bond two souls/minds through a form of technology. It’s interesting to watch but terrifying to imagine such a loss of reality in the near future, and as a generation are we heading towards that right now? Half of us can’t even leave the house without our phone in our hands, and if we realize it is sitting on the couch at home instead of at your work desk right next to you it can spiral into something as fear inducing as a panic attack.
I recently went to my internship class where I had a guest speaker come in and show us the importance of networking within our realm of social media, and how it is absolutely everywhere. I watched as the statistics scrolled down the screen. The average attention span of a human has decreased, the importance of having a facebook over owning a toothbrush, and so many other examples that showed technology/social media becoming a need and no longer a want. Up and coming companies only use these type of platforms to interact with their employees, you have to be integrated into it or you already lost half the battle.
But what if I don’t want to adapt farther than we already have, it constantly makes me question our initial survival instinct of adaptation. Are we adapting to something that strays us farther and farther away from natural instincts? Should we deem that as something to be worried about or just something to be excited about? All of it is really interpreted by the individual but being able to sit back and acknowledge the amount spent scrolling mindlessly through unneeded information. For example, the other day I looked into my setting for how much time I spent on specific app and the number completely boggled me because I could be spending that time to be doing much more productive measures.
These are just a couple of my thrown together thoughts about the growing world about us, and the technology that continuously surrounds us. We tend to forget about the soil beneath our feet, the wind in our hair, and the sound of the wind from time to time while our eyes our plastered in an artificial world.
