Henry David Thoreau spent over two years in a cabin he had built in the woodlands of Massachusetts owned by his friend and contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. He used this alone time to write his most known work – Walden , a transcendentalist piece discussing how to live simply in nature. And then one day, Thoreau heard a steam locomotive and it disrupted his meditation and piece. The machine in the garden appeared. Over a century later, Leo Marx built on this remark in his work The Machine in the Garden , a literary criticism of industrialization of America, where he discussed the disturbance in the pastoral scenery by technological advancements. Nobody likes to be disturbed, yet today we have all these devices around us that are built precisely for that purpose – to distract us from whatever we are doing and engage us in something else. We have somehow learnt to accept that this is the reality of the modern technology and we are trying to mute the disturbances as much as we can, whil
“The times they are a changing”, sang Bob Dylan in his eponymous song from 1964. It was his observation almost 60 years ago and this constant will probably follow humans forever. And that is perfectly fine. We need to be cognizant that the times are evolving and how crucial the change is for humanity. Evolution is what keeps us alive. Social media, one of the biggest technological advancements in the last few decades, was warmly welcomed until it started causing a stir. The questions about it arise on daily basis – mostly in a binary, polarising format of whether it is good or bad, although we should rethink the way we ask questions and aim for open-ended questions that call for a discourse rather than divisive points of view. Humans are social animals who need connections and they thrive in communities (The Cooperative Human, 2018), which was the social media’s main selling point. The promise of instant connectivity, and emphasis being on instant, felt so light and easy to engage