...as I am sitting on my desk, multitasking between writing, eating snacks, and sipping a soda, Wind of Change by Scorpions is heard on the background. This significant 90s track makes me think of how generations in decades have experienced change. My grandparents and parents who went through different eras claimed that as years passed by, many things altered positively in their lives. But can you have the cake and eat it, too? It was this change that enhanced many imperfections in their lives, but at the same time created distance between them as a community. Capitalism made everybody more self-centered and egoistic, thus removing the need to share and care. If my ancestors lived through monarchy, communism, and democracy, then I am living in the reign of technology. I call myself a technological determinist because I believe in technology forming society. My generation has developed a potent need to display everything they own or do on social media. Coming from a personal point of view, this happens because we want to let everybody know that we are involved with something and not just sitting around. Or we simply want to grab someone’s attention. This is a domino effect that affects everybody around us. Such a coordinated action, however, has removed the sense of privacy.
Nowadays, we live for the world, not for ourselves. Through cameras, we capture every single movement that we do or everything that surrounds us. Once, I sat in a coffee shop and let everybody know through social media that I was there. Minutes later, a friend of mine dropped by and invited himself for a coffee by claiming that he saw I was in that cafe through Instagram, and since he was near, he decided to pass by. In this case, did I really want some moments of solitude with my coffee since I let everybody know I was there? As he got his coffee, he took his phone out and said he wanted to take a photo of us to share on Instagram. After a couple of snaps and some comments on telling me to look happier in the photo, the photo was out in the world. The flaw in the process above is that natural things are meant for self-expression, not for sharing photos! I smiled in the photo because my friend asked me to, not because I actually was in a cheerful mood. Whoever saw that photo thought that Klajd looks happy and he is not struggling in anything, which is untrue. Either way, the whole scene in the cafe mirrors the actor-network theory, where everything exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. I exposed my location, my friend came over, we shared another photo where we also promoted the coffee shop franchise: everyone is affected!
Change does not display how we actually look or how do we think we look. In the interpenetration of the actual and virtual world, we are all equal. Thus, it is the technology that decides our status in society. As I finish writing this post, I can hear country music star Miranda Lambert singing “...it all just seems so good the way we had it, back before everything became automatic…”
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