By Russell Zazueta
With the increasing distraction brought by the internet, it’s surprising the human race hasn’t grown antennas for brains.
With the way this generation heeds texting, social networking and online dating as prime communication, kids are going to grow up missing the point of vis-a-vis. It’s killing the human spirit, as well as how we interact with each other and our imagination.
Even worse, a student posse will now hang out at a table looking like mindless drones with their faces shoved into a cell phone, acting like mutes and disconnected from one another.
It started as emails and chats and then progressed into social networking. Now people have the ability to share anything anywhere, for better or worse.
The tool that exponentially connects everybody around the world is also dampening human emotion. It seems people prefer a text to a call, and online dating is virtually the way to go now.
To add to this, the internet makes a mockery of dating. The human spirit thrives on whim in front of body language, not some square filled with emotionless words.
The term womanizer should be altered to cyber pimp. And to all those love-seekers, there is nothing like going out someplace and having a conversation in person for the first time with somebody you completely connect with.
Social networking has further given birth to Twitter feeds, Facebook and those god-awful selfies.
Twitter was originally made to communicate news updates and thoughts to friends everywhere, but it’s become a rat’s nest of gossip.
Youtube, particularly in music, produces lots of fail-seekers who never understood the musician culture. These people live vicariously through cover songs in front of a camera playing for ghosts, hoping to break out like Justin Beiber. Any serious musician will tell you the Internet has nothing to do with creating great music.
According to Statisiticsbrain.com, the average person’s attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000, to 8 seconds in 2013.
Is the Internet to blame?
With copious amounts of online media at our disposal, distractions are everywhere to sidetrack what’s important. The ridiculous amount of garbage on Facebook and Reddit.com are enough to do it.
How does this mindlessness spare time for imagination?
More and more people are being influenced by the mediocrity floating around on the Internet. Lets face it, imagination can not be conceived when cell phones are more important than your original thoughts and ideas.
More recently, music and film have proved to be great examples of contemporary lack of imagination. It is no wonder why Johnny-come-lately vocal artists – more than ever now – choose renditions over original music – convenience is the new imagination.
Film remakes are becoming astoundingly popular yet convenient for film studio executives to pass off as new films because a new cast and scenes is being “creative.”
There is now an entire subculture that thrives on attitudes of selfishness, entitlement and bragging rights. The Internet wins.