Everything is online but human connections
By the time I was a teenager I remember waiting the whole week very anxiously so I could sit down at a local lan-house (or cyber-café if I may) in my home neighborhood . It was a place I had at least two reasons (excuses) to be:
- Researches for my school projects (that was the formal reason and the one I repeated to my parents everytime),
- There were games I was not able to play at home since I could not afford a gaming pc (informal but not less real reason).
Now, even with the passage of so many years and being aware that none of the reasons above exist anymore, I can’t help but miss these times, because although I can now afford a gaming pc and do the researches for post-graduation on my own laptop, the human connections that we had back in the day are things we cannot have back.
The video rental shops were also really popular by the end of the 1990’s and early 2000’s and the best thing I remember from that time is the fact that we (at least most of us) had to wait to do anything on the web, since internet was a resource available only in regular PC’s. Actually, the reason we used to rent videos was because streaming was still a thing of the future.
Whenever you wanted to share anything online you could not get away from the keyboard (I wonder if the acronym AFK is used by people below 30 years old). Now that I look back, it was fantastic!
I mean, nor 5G, 4G or 3G were available to anyone, so you did have to wait a little until you could get home or to one of those lan-houses to then and only then post on social media (rest in peace Orkut) a picture you took with your friends by the beach and wait until someone reacted to it (and it was not like your cellphone was going to beep and tell you someone had in fact reacted to that picture almost instantly or made some joke about your hair).
I wonder how nowaday’s teenagers would react to having to wait a whole day or multiple days just to see if someone sent them an inbox. Most would not be able to cope with the terrible pain.
The speed with which these types of communications flow nowadays make me dizzy, you don’t even have time to feel some expectation or wonder what things will be like anymore.
You just have to be there and digest as much “entertainment” as possible — an all you can eat online buffet that has never been free on the first place, for you and your data are the ones paying the bill.
To a certain degree, the now old-fashioned verb zapping provided you some more freedom than today’s insane-unending instagram and the compulsive usage many suffer from, because turning the TV off now looks much easier than logging out from Instagram or Facebook or any other social media.
I understand we humans have limited capacity when it comes to leading with great amounts of information, so when there’s too much of it available we either get more and more stressful/anxious in trying to swallow it at once or do not even bother and log out.
By the way, it doesn’t look like we are doing a good job deciding what is best for us concerning the so called social media, and the anxiety rates prove that type of addiction to internet.
Very recently I have had to purchase a new phone and instead of just discarding the old one I decided to keep it solely for Instagram access, so I could be free from it most part of the day.
At first it felt strange not to be unlocking my device every 30 seconds just to find out there was not any new notification available, but later on it felt freeing — the same awesomeness I used to feel in my teens.
Don’t know why, but a Barney Stinson quote came to my mind the moment I wrote about the awesomeness vibe:
“When I get sad I stop being sad and be awesome instead.”
Anyways, I would not do like my grandma and prescribe you a treatment for your internet addiction the way she recommended tea for cough to her family members and neighbors, but I’ll say it may work for you the same way it did for me — logging out from Instagram or maybe running an extra mile and unistalling them helped me significantly in managing my own time.
It may work for you as well.
Just saying…
