We have entered a terrible mill of rapid information flow. The details of our daily lives have become dependent on the information and canned readings that technology provides us. We have become accustomed to laziness and indolence. There is no longer time in the face of all this informational flood to read an entire book or watch a good movie that contains an idea from which questions are generated.
We have entered an era of searching for quick answers and immediate service to provide those answers, and swallowing them without any intellectual digestion. It seems that Francis Fukuyama’s theory about the end of history, which he produced in the late eighties of the last century, has its presence, as we are moving into the age of robots, and the robot is not as we imagined it to be the size and shape of a human with a head, hands and feet, but rather a small screen the size of the palm of the hand with no edges, and we are crammed into the screen and the content it gives us.
A few days ago, I decided to have an experience that I thought would be easy, but was difficult to go through and harsh in its results. I decided to turn off my phone on an official holiday, a rest area from work and the world, and I decided to put down a book that I had postponed reading for a year and a half to continue reading its pages that I stopped in the first quarter of, and I got ready to watch a movie from the good old days, the Italian “Cinema Paradiso” with a decent translation that would give me the idea of the movie that I would never get tired of watching – as I thought unfortunately – and between reading and enjoying a beautiful movie, I set aside a long time to spend with my daughter to talk about many details about her life that I also thought I knew! What happened was that I got nervous the moment I turned off the phone, and my mind became preoccupied with expected calls that might happen, and questions in my mind that increased the tension in the amount of possible expectations if I did not answer those calls.
I gathered my courage and went ahead with my plan, and after an unfortunate discovery that I had lost the skill of repairing and maintaining simple things around the house, I took my beautiful book, a Latin novel that I had stopped reading a long time ago, and I had read a quarter of it only to find that I had lost the narrative thread, and had forgotten all about that first quarter, so I decided to read it from the first page. Between every two pages, the tension returns and I look at my phone, which is drowned in the darkness of the screen and is turned off. There is no doubt that someone has sent at least a message, perhaps so-and-so called now and did not find me, the email, why did I not check it before turning off the phone? Then I return to the pages. I ask myself about the name of a city mentioned in the novel, a distant city on the other side of the planet, this needs “Google”, but the phone is turned off. I am curious to know the city and the prices of hotels in it, are there direct flights to it? I pay attention to the type of my questions that are packaged within the options for direct consumption! So I return to the book. I did not read the first quarter of it this time.
I was bored and fed up. I called my busy daughter on her phone, I asked her to put the phone down so we could talk, she was happy at first, but she kept holding her phone in her hand, and between each sentence she was talking about any message or alert she received. In our conversation I discovered that I was far from many details that she assured me she had talked to me about, she proved that to me through messages of communication between me and her that I unfortunately did not read
. I excused myself, and stayed with the film, Cinema Paradiso. It was the only one who succeeded in pulling me away from this fierce reality. I entered it again, I paid close attention to the wonderful human sentences in it. For three hours I was in “Paradiso” with all my feelings. For three hours I was outside of all this packaging, to which I returned the next morning…unfortunately.
*Jordanian writer residing in Belgium
#virtual #box