We spend our time awaiting, scrolling, reloading, checking.
I, with dread, often catch myself making checking my smartphone my main activity.
But what are we waiting for? Why do we feel that responsible for this black mirror?
In short, I think that it has become an integral part of us, of humans and the society.
Just as we have mastered controlling our bodies at a young age and learned to react to sensory input, we now have another source of input we have to incorporate into our minds.
And just as we used to go to places for views or news or literally had to ‘get our hands on’ information, all of that is now much easier and practically unified through a certain window, a portal that carries us anywhere and gives us anything.
With this potential, we can communicate much faster, work together from different places in the world, we can access knowledge beyond comprehension and don’t have to worry to much about our physical situation to achieve that.
But what does it matter, where you are or who you meet, when you have anything and anyone in your pocket already?
Surely, it matters still. But it gets less and less every day. Look around you in the subway, at a train station, in a waiting room at the doctor’s.
We are getting used to it. It is part of our everyday life, as much of it actually happens inside our smartphone.
We even expect swift replies, updates and reports in a manner which would have brought down the best organised postal system of the past.
But what happens to us humans and to our society, when noone just looks beyond their screens anymore and beyond what is happening in that strange place called ‘the internet’?
We might not have arrived at that point yet, but I intend not to find myself there.
Instead, I want to pull something off, one more time.
Just as I banished all communication from my smartphone when I went to New Zealand.
As I will go to live in another place now for 6 months, working for the same company remotely, I have the chance to shape parts of my life differently.
So this is the plan: I will rid my smartphone of any instant messaging service, of every entertainment application, of every social media element and only keep the bare necessities to go places.
Of course I will keep all access to all communication channels on another device, but that one will be restricted to one place, maybe one room only.
I might even look at this other device only at fixed times each day.
Yet my work will be all digital and I will not stop indulging in digital entertainment in my spare time. But I want a clear border between the so-called ‘real world’ outside and the digital, online world.
This will allow me to keep all of my thoughts outside of my pockets. I won’t spend a single thought on whether there is something new inside that pocket. I will walk the streets and I will be there, in those streets. Undivided and without an alternative digital reality and without the chance of fleeing into the warm bosom of the infinite scroll…
But I am a little afraid, too: Where will I find myself then? What will happen when I am bound to my natural means of communication?
One thing is certain: It will be another grand adventure! And I am thankful to embark on this voyage!
Maybe I will find out what it means to be a single organic person, instead of a fused being: Half in the flesh, half floating in cyberspace.
Wouldn’t you want to know as well?
