I prefer to walk. It keeps me calm. Every time I use my feet as transport I begin to notice unpredictable things in my surroundings. Simply by listening and watching more carefully everyday life becomes more valuable and interesting.
Restless behaviour. To wait for your turn, for someone or something takes a lot of our attention and patience. Slowness is often used as a negative characteristic. However, if you look at nature with all its complexity you understand what the process of time can bring.
Technology in daily life makes us more effective and increases quality time with family and friends. Consequently, tools for communication replace the physical bonding between people.
Telephone, Internet makes everything accessible 24 hours. Everything is in my reach with a couple of buttons. Furthermore, language has become simplified and straight forward, but more impersonal aswell. Our own expressions have been replaced with a combination of two symbols
March 12th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
“Technology in daily life makes us more effective and increases quality time with family and friends.” This reminded me of something: I noticed that when people used to talk about the future in the 40ies and 50ies, they envisioned it many times as an ideal life where technology does so many things for us that we’d have more time to sit around outside in the sun, have picknicks, play with children/pets/friends, read books etc. But as you correctly mention above, what has increased for most people is not the quality time spent doing these things, but just time messing around with these technologies, using them to do too many things that then become impersonal. Personally I think it’s very possible to use technology only for saving time that we can then spend for important things, but many times it seduces us into impersonal passive activities like watching endless youtube videos or joining facebook. I wonder if this general human tendency of filling up that useful free time with impersonal communication is completely useless, or if that’s just the way humanity evolves because people don’t know what to do with their time anyway…