What is a person without social media these days? Someone who has the courage to say no to twitter, facebook, linkedin, tumblr and every other network out there. It seems you don’t exist without social media. Not counting email of course, I think we can safely say email is very necessary in this postmodern society. If you don’t have email, you can survive but it’ll be hard. A job application process becomes much more of a drag with no electronic mailaccount. And even with a digital presence job applications are already quite a nuisance.
In the 21st century we’ve become more dependent on technology than at any other time in history. Most of us can’t imagine a life without a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop. These consumer goods are ruling us, just like Louis XIV once ruled over the masses in seventeenth century France.
Slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century, after the American Civil War, but now we are slaves to our phones. Unplugging yourself from the system is considered asocial and weird.
The persisting questions are: “Do we want to unplug ourselves? Is it bad to be dependent on the internet?” Personally I would answer with two negations. I did think this over really well, while typing this, but in the end the Internet has made me happier.
I can only speak for myself but thanks to this endless source of knowledge I was able to discover music and movies I’d never have encountered otherwise. Sure it must’ve been fun to live in the heydays of popular music and psychedelic culture, when David Bowie, John Lennon and Jim Morrison were hitting the charts. I have read and watched a lot about the 1960’s and it seems everything was so cool then. But unless I could go back in time to experience it myself, I’m glad I was born in 1989. It was the year when the Berlin wall fell. For many people in eastern Europe this meant the end of a long and frustrating period of communism.
Today Berlin is a thriving city with a great art scene. I love going there. Don’t know what exactly makes me prefer Berlin over Paris or London, it’s hard to pinpoint the attraction. Maybe it’s because time in Berlin moves in a different way than elsewhere? People in Berlin don’t care about appearances, in that sense it must be similar to the 1960’s.
Of course, 50 years ago Berlin was a divided city, and the eastern part was not a pleasant place to live. Because of that historic injustice Berlin has now become the coolest city. As time progresses, different places gain importance. Paris was the place to be at the end of the nineteenth century with the artists of the Fin de siècle.
In the Roaring 1920’s New York took over, just read the Great Gatsby if you don’t believe me (some academic works will suffice too, but even though the Great Gatsby is a novel, Fitzgerald paints a pretty good picture of the zeitgeist).
The 1950’s were a high point for Hollywood and Los Angeles. Of course that doesn’t mean Paris or New York have lost importance, things continue to happen all over the world.
The Internet has democratized the earth. Well in theory of course. In reality not everyone has access to the world wide web. The eurocentric world view of the nineteenth century has been replaced by the Americanization. Sadly it still matters a lot where you are born. We have a long way to go before an equal world is finally real (not that everyone has to earn the same amount of money like in communism), but at least everyone should have equal chances to use their talents.
