A Life Online: How Digital Devices Are Shaping Our Reality
Devices contain our entire lives: photos, music, work documents, conversations, and finances.
Instead of taking a vinyl out of a sleeve and adjusting a record player, we can listen to any genre of music by simply pressing play.
Books and library cards have become kindles and downloaded pages.
Photos of events and memories are all in a camera roll, somewhere in the cloud, instead of a yellowed and well-thumbed photo album.
But in a world that is becoming increasingly digital, are we losing touch with each other and our physical environment?
The act of connecting and interacting with the world around us has changed, as has the way we consume content; we watch videos, listen to podcasts and audio books, and scroll Instagram, instead of getting our pictures developed, going to an art gallery, or reading a book.
Our devices are intended for convenience, to make our lives as efficient as possible, without recognising the necessity of appreciating the everyday.
The combined pressure to ‘live in the moment’ and ‘capture the moment online’ can result in us missing out on the real value of experiences and blind us to the beauty in the mundane and familiar features of our daily lives.
The world we can access through technology is so expansive it is often overwhelming and disorientating.
We find ourselves obsessing over the image we create online, and the depiction of ourselves through a screen.
The digital life we cultivate, becomes our only source of memory, a rehearsed image and set, conforming to a certain aesthetic or trend.
But by building our life behind a screen, we have become dependent on our devices. Becoming so reliant on technology has left us detached and vulnerable.
A power cut, website crash, or digital hack could quickly leave us finding our whole identity and history deleted.
When separated from our devices we feel incomplete and cut off from our friends, family, and entire world.
But the digital world doesn’t have to replace the real one. Technology unlocks a level of scope and choice, providing limitless creative, academic, and developmental possibilities.
Social media has given a platform for communities of like-minded people to share their creativity, concepts, and ideas on a worldwide level.
Websites and online adverts help raise money and awareness for campaigns and movements and social media accounts help small businesses get ideas off the ground and reach international audiences.
Our world is changing, modernising, and evolving. Technology is a tool with enormous possibility, that we can use as a resource as well as a medium of expression, but it can also become all encompassing.
While we may feel a need to keep up and stay ahead, by slowing down, and taking the time to go for a walk, chat with a friend or read a novel, we connect on a deeper level to ourselves, and those around us.
We all have a fleeting time and the pressure to ‘live it right’ is stopping us from actually just living. Take a moment to switch off your devices and give someone your full attention, put on an album and listen properly to the lyrics, watch a comfort film, and be fully in the present.
