Which one would you take?
A few years back, I was enjoying a beautiful sunset with my older daughter at Gisborne after a light jog. It is a very special sunset due to the geographic position of the beach where you have the impression of the sun going down over the sea and we are talking about an east coast beach, so only this fact is already unique, isn’t it?
Anyway, barefoot on the sand, feeling the temperature dropping quickly, bird calls in the trees so loud that they compete with the sound of the waves, the wind now blowing from the land to the sea, the sky colour changing from blue to yellow, orange, and many other colour spectrums in between that I can’t count or name it properly even using the Pantone colour palette.
That was the moment we heard a couple filming the sunset with a cell phone and having a conversation. The woman asked: “Did you finish recording?”
The man responded: “Yes, I can’t wait to get back home and watch it on our 4K TV.”
My first thought was: When did reality become boring at this level? What is blocking them from seeing and feeling the real world? They have just missed the chance of enjoying the ‘5D’ sunset experience, watching all different red colours coming up, feeling their eyes adapting to a different light set, feeling the wind change, the temperature going down … I am sorry, you will not have that on 4K!
Smartphones connected to the internet are blocking people from seeing the world with their own eyes. Moreover, social media applications are playing a debatable game by studying and analysing what we do online and how to make more profit from us; offerings, notifications, and many other tools are used to keep us busy online and without noticing it, we end up being manipulated by these mega corporations.
All this happens with our permission when we click on: ‘I accept’. With the excuse of providing a better user experience, we give up our privacy in exchange for becoming part of these social platforms. Remember, we are not a client for these companies, we are their product.
This is just like in the movie The Matrix, where the lead character Neo was given the option of taking a red pill, which would enable him to leave the shadows and start living a real life out of the matrix. Morpheus also offered a blue pill which would allow Neo to return to his illusion.
By accepting the terms and services of these platforms, we are taking the blue pill, which will put us into a made-up illusion life where everything that interacts with us is controlled by an organisation and not by us, ourselves. That’s where the problems begin, because recent studies show that adults are getting addicted to these internet-connected applications with the same impact of any other drugs, leading us to depression, high anxiety, violence and introspection.
Abilio Oliveira (PhD/IT Thought Leader)
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