Weekend-Engagement 198/ Living inside the screen

I often have the feeling that time is passing faster and faster. We live in a world that has changed radically in just a few decades. When I grew up, society was not very different from the society in which my parents had grown up. They thought that the key to well-being was to study, to be trained in a profession in order to have a good future.

In a very short time our world became completely informatized, it became part of the World Wide Web. Initially we searched there for information or we communicated by mail, today institutions of all kinds force us to make any management through the Internet: if we want to get our identity card or our passport we have to do it online, if we need a medical appointment we have to do it online or by WhatsApp, if we want to read the news we have to do it online, if we want to make a job appointment, if we want to offer any product or service, if we want to watch a movie or series that we like. Now we even fall in love online! This seems crazy to me. Our whole life has been put inside a screen! There is no choice.

What I am beginning to find worrying is the large number of people who cannot live without being connected to a cell phone, and this includes me! For professional reasons I am connected every day and for much of the day to my cell phone and computer. To write, to communicate, to advertise my courses and services, to give and receive courses, to carry out all kinds of formalities. But also, and I am aware of this, I can spend a good part of my time on social networks viewing content, viewing images, leaving comments. Do I really need to do this? And I feel anxiety when I am disconnected for a long time.

Today when I went out to a shopping mall with my friend Maria Luisa to have an ice cream together and talk, I took my cell phone and started taking pictures of several people I saw glued to their cell phones, as if hypnotized by the screen. They were not talking to each other, they were looking at their phones. I think this is not right. Some of them were walking, but they couldn't let go of their phone. What is wrong with today's society? I insist, this is crazy. What do you think? Do you also need to be glued to your cell phone for a large part of your time? That's called addiction. It seems that like in some old movies we have been dominated by computers. Because one thing is to use electronic devices to make some tasks easier and another thing is that we have to be glued to these devices a good part of our time.