PRESENCIA/Our world

It is the new social arena of human kind. The world has become smaller and we are all addicted to it.

PRESENCIA

Our world

by

David Alberto Muñoz

Remember when we used to write letters by hand. At school they used to give us exercises to make our handwriting better. I remember I hated to do that type of homework, pages and pages of circles, trees and who knows what else! Now it sounds crazy but it is true. It wasn’t that long ago, and yet it seems like an eternity. I still remember when television was only black and white, and you actually had to get up to change the channel, and there were only two stations that began to transmit around four o’clock in the afternoon. Or when in order to call someone long distance on the phone I needed the help of a telephone operator. Back then I knew the actual numbers, now we used the phone to text message one another. Have you ever thought about it? It is crazy!

Today everything is so different. We seemed to be hook on technology and perhaps we are even forgetting how to write properly. There is a new language in the atmosphere. OMG! LOL! Signals we send through a computer that are not only for entertainment but also for work. How can we forget about the god of the new millennium: the Internet! Almost everybody is connected. Facebook, Hi5, Classmates, MySpace etc. All of the sudden I discover that not only my friends but my co-workers and supervisor are also there. Privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Everything we type in the computer might be view by the entire world even though there are programs that protect us from the virus of contemporary life.

It is the new social arena of human kind. The world has become smaller and we are all addicted to it. Digital TV, plasma screens, adapters, the ability of having a meeting in Singapore from your office or home computer, a Blackberry, now we can walk, run and drive with our e-mail, the premise of the modern world is “be connected.”

We love to show our private lives by placing pictures of our family, our careers, our parties, for anyone to see. This is a generation of images. The written word is reserved for those who went to school and studied literature hoping to win someday the Nobel price. Everything is connected to technology. Education, politics, sex, sentimentality, anger, passion, hunger, you name it. Even the new president has a page in Facebook. By the way he hasn’t answered my request to be friends.

I wonder what the future holds, internet available at the bottom of the ocean, being able to see e-mail after your own death, or perhaps they will place a chip in our brain at the moment of birth to allow us to surf the web at the precise instant of thought.

Yes, I remember things used to be simpler. We used to date people we meet through friends and acquaintances, now you meet someone on the web who might live across the ocean, you develop a relationship and you can even get married based on information you read on a screen that by the way can also be a digital screen for better quality of images.

Everything is fast. It is expected that we must keep up. It is an addiction. We want to be all over the place at the same time. Work, read and answers e-mails, have fun, find friends, flirt with someone you like, be married, raise children, know how to use the latest technology, know how to react, what to do, be patience, efficient and proper, cut and paste, load images in the computer, send them to CNN or MSNBC, take pictures with your cellular of everything because you don’t know, maybe you’ll be the only one with such an image. Oh! And please, do it all at the same time. It is exhausting!

That is the modern life, cables, connections, networking, connectivity, high speed internet, videos, page layout, references, LimeWire, fonts and sizes, backgrounds, symbols, Blogs, and knowing the latest news before it happens.

It is a crazy world but it is our world.

© 2009 Fotos y texto

David Alberto Muñoz, Ph.D.
Faculty Philosophy & Religious Studies
Chandler-Gilbert Community College
2626 East Pecos Road
Chandler, Arizona 85225-2499
(480) 732-7173
david.munoz@cgcmail.maricopa.edu