Funny how everybody is keen on reading books, but hardly anyone notices what's happening when you do that. You're basically looking at marked tree bark and hallucinate vividly for hours. That's all there is to it.
And yet, it's socially accepted and encouraged.
The main reason for that is because this activity has been registered as a useful one for the society. Books are (in general) useful data cores. They either contain verified knowledge, packed in various formats, or stories with intense emotional patterns. In time, these data cores have been amended time and again by the readers, and they improved.
But this wasn't always the case.
I know many of you don't remember this, and it's ok, many of you weren't even born around that time. But in the beginning, a few hundreds years ago, the data cores contained in books were highly arbitrary. For a few decades, if not more, they were basically tutorials for burning witches. Yes, I know it sounds harsh, but that's all there was to them. They were booklets containing techniques for spotting (and dealing with) dangerous and, obviously, inexistent, creatures. Basically, if you were born with red hair or freckle you were doomed.
It took a lot of time until the demand for this type of information faded away.
In a way, the same thing is happening with the internet these days. You would expect humanity would use this tech to exponentially improve its knowledge, and pack the smartphones' content with incredibly dense and useful data cores. What's happening instead is that you're watching numbly, for hours, and days, and weeks, and years, either porn, or meaningless fights between people you never met.
You're watching highly engineered glass and hallucinate vividly for hours, every day.
You're just experiencing the "witch hunting tutorial" moment of the internet tech.
In the future, spending your day "inside" a smart phone will be highly regarded, just as reading a book today is. That's because the content will be amended continuously by the users, and, in time, the type of stuff that's on those data cores will be replaced. There will be tons of verified knowledge and stories with intense emotional patterns.
Until then, though, many will be sucked into the meaningless vortex of anger and frustration.
Choose wisely, for there is only one way to reach the future: survive the present.
