Don't Look

In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up, kids enjoyed summers roaming the fields and woods, meeting friends on the street and riding their bikes around town.

Today, that has become a scarce good in a world littered with roads and suburban infrastructure. I would say that in hindsight, it was one of the greatest achievements of humanities:  Children growing up healthy and free in communities that were inhabited by neighbours not by cars and play stations. 

There is not one day that I don’t fret about my computer and curse the time I waste trying to download one thing or upload another.  There is no way of turning back the wheel of  human development, but what sort of development is this and are we really headed the right direction?  Truly, the internet is quite a mind boggling thing with all that it does and all the gates it opens.  But mostly it has added speed to our world and made it smaller - in many ways.

Along with it came major incursions into our privacy.  In a way, we were dragged out of the shadow of our private lives into the virtual market place of humanity where everything can be bought and sold at the sound of a “click.”     

With that, however, we have entrusted our existences to something we don’t understand, control or even manage very well. 

Remembering our passwords or deciding when and whether to download an upgrade is the extent of my expertise.  I am probably pretty much average when it comes to cyber problem solving.   Most of the time, the friendly Apple guy (99% are guys!) at the other end, has a lot of advice but not really a solution either. 

Despite that ongoing frustration, we carry on in a world that is not only dominated by alienating processes and hair raising transaction speeds, but we have accepted it as normal.  We don’t question it anymore.

In the meantime, landscapes become littered with all the products we might want to acquire at a mouse click.  The energy to power our newly acquired gusto for high tech stuff  is becoming scarce at the same speed that our dependency on it grows.  In parts of the world it is now being sourced in perilous depths, endangering fresh water supplies and contributing to our greatest foe: climate change. 

Maybe because of all that we prefer to celebrate childood in a 2D format nowadays, instead of taking a look outside.