I will start this reflection by acknowledging that I feel like a dinosaur in the middle of an immense ocean of technological advances.
I do not deny its benefits (which are many and in various community areas), it would be imprudent and unfair of me to ignore its more than obvious positive effects. But I resist accelerating in me a process of "conversion to this bottled modernity" that I still sense is foreign and distant from my life purposes. Perhaps due to a matter of age, personal health, or simply a desire to annoy.
However, behind this resistance to the excess that reigns in this haughty technological era, there is no void of reasons. Rather, it is about "basic convictions", mainly in relation to the negative impact that it has had and continues to have on people's relational processes.
I believe that technological advances have significantly damaged our listening and awareness of the "other". It is not about combating new forms of communication, it is about stopping this intense darkness that prevails in community communication dynamics.
We have denigrated the skin, legitimizing the power of screens without remorse. We have replaced personal talents with the comfort and confidence offered by artificial intelligence. In fact, current generations only conceive the world around them through a screen. They have become digital natives.
Their vision of things has lost depth of perspective and civic criticism. In turn, they have gained in decorum and informational impulsiveness. We encourage the speed of day-to-day life, that voracity of consumption of immediacy, barely harboring encounter, reflection, or compassion for the contexts.
The promoters of fake controversies, lies bathed in suspicious varnishes of truth, the half-baked spokesmen, fleeting heroes sustained by insubstantial reels have won.
In this context of generalized civic disaffection, what is truly disturbing is the loss of faith in people.
The tools (technology) have crossed the horizon of their nature to become primary, essential for existence. People remain in the background, in an astonishing oblivion of their possibilities and shared growth.
In fact, our skills and abilities are directed based on the permanent adaptations and modifications that technology shows us, and not the other way around.
These digital tools were born with the vocation to serve and help us improve (in fact, they have achieved a successful accommodation of people: collective consciousness is mortally wounded). They did not arise to annul wills. They did not emerge to indoctrinate us and teach us how to live...
And it is not valid to blame or say that it is a matter for the boys/girls of today. It is up to us (adults) to emerge "as the last line of protection". We are the direct managers of this apathy, of this backwardness in interpersonal communication, of this clumsy stubbornness to stir up soulless revolutions.
We fell into the trap of evasion in order not to feel so much accumulated garbage in everyday life. They sold us a beautiful product, ignoring its external cracks. Misleading advertising, premeditated crime....
Martha Lane Fox said "technology becomes obsolete quickly; it is knowledge and creativity that will always be valuable..."