As a civilization, we have always strived for progress and prosperity, constantly improving ourselves and striving to make life easier and better.
Do you remember the days when the greatest punishment for children who got a failing grade in mathematics or got dirty playing football with their friends in front of the building was a beating? It was not so long ago that parents would call their children home from the balcony because they had to get up early and go to school the next morning. And when Marko took Danilo's ball without giving it back, Marko's parents would give him a good whipping, after which he would apologize to Danilo, and the next day they would be scoring goals again, assisting each other.
Those days were not so long ago that one cannot remember what it was like to play hide-and-seek, Ledenog čiče, or simply sit in front of the building and dream about where everyone would go with their parents when the summer holidays arrived. Although not much time has passed since those days, today it is almost impossible for us to imagine them. Older people, as well as the children who have now grown up, should remember what it was like back in 2006, when the World Cup was being played and we cheered for the football team we supported. They should remember what it was like when we would get together, then go to a café, sing decent football chants, and spend halftime coming up with tactics to improve our team's performance in the second half. That richness of togetherness disappeared overnight. Or has it simply been replaced by a new kind of socializing, known as socializing in the digital age?
I recently overheard two high-school-aged friends saying that things used to be more difficult, whereas now life is much easier because everything is available. For a moment, I wondered what exactly they meant by that. Perhaps because they can solve every problem through the Google search engine, which can provide them with useful information? Or because they use the Internet to connect with people who live on the other side of the planet? Yet it seems to me that sooner or later this ends with people sitting among their close friends and, instead of talking to one another, surfing the Internet. Or with young people pursuing girls not in person, but through constant flirting on social media.
As a civilization, we have always strived for progress and prosperity, constantly improving ourselves and striving to make life easier and better. It was believed that we would become richer and happier. The twenty-first century was supposed to be an age of prosperity, where everything would be within our reach. Seen from that perspective, the two friends mentioned above are right! However, we made a serious mistake along the way — technology seems to have slipped out of our control and, in many cases, produced the opposite effect. Even our everyday lives are slipping out of our hands. As an example, I will mention a perhaps banal but, in reality, unfortunately common situation: when our mother runs out of flour in the middle of the chaos in the kitchen and asks us to help by going to the store, we stubbornly ignore her, unwilling to tear ourselves away from the computer, with the thought in our heads: Go yourself! I have more important things to do!
Being beaten for dirtying our clothes is no longer even remotely our greatest punishment. It is far worse when our router stops working, or, God forbid, the neighbor's does if we are stealing his Internet connection. Then a terrible problem arises — how on earth are we supposed to finish browsing the stories of our ex-girlfriends now!
In addition to these situations from everyday life, Internet consumption also has a negative impact on much more complex matters, after which society finds itself facing major problems whose consequences are felt for many years to come. One such matter is education. It is a fundamental category of every society, and everything begins with it. We know that genuine knowledge is acquired through thorough and detailed study of official and relevant literature. Today, however, it has become commonplace to acquire knowledge mainly by reading extremely condensed material offered on the Internet. The problem here is not the medium itself, but the tendency to shorten and simplify every piece of content available on it as much as possible. By reading such material, one cannot gain insight into the essence of the subject itself, nor can one acquire a broader understanding of what is being studied, so learning from such material can freely be described as rote learning.
Another major problem is the phenomenon whereby, when someone's artistic work, for example, is published, the opportunity is left open for unrestricted commenting, in which, instead of constructive criticism, we often encounter extremely vulgar and deeply offensive comments. All of this leads to the devaluation of any serious work produced by individuals who are unwilling to accept the new rules of the game unofficially established by the emergence of new technology.
Be that as it may, we cannot ignore the fact that we live in an age in which we cannot imagine a single day without modern technological devices. We have become accustomed to letting them perform most of our tasks for us. This means constantly purchasing increasingly modern devices in order to keep pace with contemporary technology and gain access to new, cutting-edge programs.
Thus, we find ourselves in a situation where most of us, especially those who are less experienced, constantly worry about the health of our technology while often neglecting our own, losing many essential skills, particularly physical ones. All of this comes at considerable expense, creating a sense of power and belonging to some kind of elite, when in reality it is nothing more than an illusion.
More precisely, it leads us toward ever-increasing spiritual impoverishment, the end of which, unfortunately, is nowhere in sight.
The modern age, in which we as a civilization are sliding toward ruin, served as my inspiration for writing this text.