They no longer chase emotions around the world, do not perform feats and travel, they sit at a computer, weave a web.
HURRAH!!! Here it is! Thoughts are refreshed, my heart stops, and my lungs are filled with morning inspiration. That was what my senses were looking for at six in the morning, prowling around like a homing missile. Now I really woke up! I, a resident of the XXI century, not just a citizen, not only a person … I am a PC user, I am NEO … A USER, an inhabitant of the Network reality, the Matrix !!!
With the spread of the Internet, the lifestyle of the modern homo sapiens has changed. Upgraded? Or deformed? I personally find it difficult to judge - I confess, biased. I cannot imagine myself in the shoes of a peasant of the era of the bravura All-Union radio and black-and-white televisions, or even earlier, who knew only the neighbors' gossip and occasionally visiting artists. How could you live so slowly and not hang yourself out of boredom in a barn? At least, visiting my village relatives, I miss HIM so much, my dear, beloved dual-core …
I no longer chase emotions around the world, I do not perform feats and travel. I sit at a computer, weaving a web. More precisely, the Web is already entwining the whole world, and I will equip inside it my little cunning cocoon-domain - my virtual kingdom, my "profile", My Preciousness. And not to say that the occupation is stupid! Some have made a rather big fortune, engaged in the design of the virtual space, investing their brains in social networks and network games, someone else villainously rummages through the closed files of government, banking and military departments, and someone else completely disposes of other people's lives, controlling combat robots … On the Web, after all, a lot is possible, you just need access.
But no one will ever give me such access - I am a tiny spider. But there is quite a lot on the part of "big spiders" - implicit suggestive technologists - attempts to get into my soul via the World Wide Web, and from there - into my pocket with my own hand, since souls are not valued. Advertising catches your eye wherever you look; newspapers, books and magazines are full of her; TV shows - the more interesting, the longer they advertise; and along the roads and at all - nature has resigned itself, does not already resist that its beauty is obscured by the ugly rectangular wind-resistant billboards with advertisements. Cityscapes are tired of fighting and have turned into an “urban environment” stuffed with stands, trends, brands … All supermarkets use sales strategies based on research into the subconscious mechanisms of our choice. We are consumers, but they consume us.
Having provided us with the most minuscule - the opportunity to create "my world" as a trash heap of re-posts, and thus legalizing itself, the "World Wide Web" has ceased to be purely virtual; groping for the forms of influence on us, all these "banners" and "windows" climbed out of the monitor, like mad monsters, overlapping us like wolf hunters - flags. But manipulation geniuses are not enough!
Once Stephen King, with a foreseeable imagination, drew the following situation: one cunning virtual technologist got into the habit of getting into the minds of his victims, users of the advanced neurotechnical Network, extracting incredible feelings of omnipotence from their torment. The film "Lawnmower" was filmed based on the novel. And so it began … Recently, one Japanese cybergenic asserted to his colleagues at a congress in the United States that an idea, extremely useful for the vast majority of people, could be realized in "virtuality" if a special technology of physical training is introduced into our life - with the help of impulses from electrodes connected to us you can not only develop muscles,you can get tactile sensations from the information contact modulated by the processor with other subscribers in virtual reality! When communicating with someone on the other side of the earth, we could feel him as if in direct contact - the 3D system, 4D … here "rests". In "Japanese" Internet groups, they argue about whether it is worth ordering expensive equipment now, or wait until it is tested on enthusiastic adventurers.
Personally, I am against it! Of course, a laptop entered my life long ago and firmly, but I’m not ready to put on a suit of such a robocop and lie in deep sleep behind my four walls, twitching in the high of galvanic discharges. I can say, "obsolete". I like waking up in my bed in the morning, looking out at the street through the open window, breathing in the smell of life, meeting my gaze with the household, drinking coffee, playing with my fluffy Barsik, communicating in the club with peers and in the classroom with students “live”. There is much in the world, friend Horatio!.. Not foreseen, and not programmed by users. And thank God! Thank God! Although … after all, we, “advanced”, “modern”, are so unlike our parents and, perhaps, the new generation will make a different choice.
For example, my cousin, I think, is already dependent on social networks. Day and night, it has several pages enabled on different systems. Day and night, he is ready to respond from various accounts and share links "in contact friends." He himself is a one hundred percent gambling addict. Aunt Natasha (his mother) asks me to scold him more often; especially in summer, Dimka does not sleep during the day or at night - he plays online games on the Internet, he is addicted to the madness of network games: Counter Strike, Anriel, Wold of Farcraft and others. I can imagine how Aunt Natasha comes into the room of her son, and he, instead of lessons, plays on his computer. The task was to translate the text into English. Dima enters the Internet to do a job with the help of a google translator, and is immediately distracted by games …
I smile, because I once had this. Only I played less, then apart from "Quake" there were no such exciting online toys. I remember going to the Internet to fight with a really complex English technical text about the device of a tank (they asked to help translate from our Omsk Tank Engineering Academy). I start to play something, look at different pictures, read, and - I came to my senses two hours later, at night …
Sitting at a computer for a long time brings income, perhaps, only to sellers from large online stores. An acquaintance of mine from the gym, the creator of his Vkontakte group, which specializes in the sale of iPhones and musical instruments, delivers goods directly to their homes at the addresses of Internet customers. The competition for "mobile sales" is high, Evgeny admits, so you have to be constantly on the Web, often sit in the "Messages" window, monitor spam links, advertisements from other groups. Eugene is so used to being in touch on the Web and answering everyone the same way that sometimes he agrees with me briefly: “Ok”.
Sometimes people get so used to this kind of correspondence communication that they hardly enter the real "animal" world. Sometimes you will not stretch your acquaintances or friends anywhere on the street, but on Vkontakte they are ready to write off tremendous tirades with “emoticons” and other icons expressing their deep and complex Internet emotions …
My senior colleague in the literary workshop, a member of the Union of Writers of Russia, Yuri Petrovich Perminov, once admitted that he gained a dozen kilograms, working every day at the computer from morning to evening. Yuri Petrovich journalist, poet, editor of the literary supplement of the newspaper "Omskoe Vremya". The authors contact him through a social network, send materials from different cities.
- Today, - Yuri Perminov shares by phone, - Sergey Lavrentievich Donbai sent the work of several poets. The other day "by mail" came articles-reports on the literary process from the head of the department of essays "Siberian Lights". There is a lot of work, the newspaper is published regularly, the salary is paid on time, and accordingly I work according to the schedule. I don't eat well, and again I don't go out because of the computer.
Nowadays, the computer has ceased to be a luxury item, like a TV set and a transistor radio were once. Almost every family has its own home PC, pocket smartphone or iPhone. In any minibus, half of the passengers rides, staring at a small colorful screen, and not at a book or at a window: people of all ages and both sexes play Tetris and other simple applications, whiling away the time, hang out on the Internet, barely having time to flip through touch pages with the skill of a magician and the magician.
The virtual world sucks the consciousness of people, enslaves us psychologically - warned researchers about Internet addiction Kolchanova and Voiskunsky in their articles.
On the Internet resource of the Psychological Fund "Imago" I come across such confessions:
- I began to suspect that I had problems with Internet addiction, when one day I got up at 3 o'clock in the morning to get into the "net", and there I met my friend who had not yet gone to bed. At 3 o'clock in the morning, he was still "hanging" on the Internet …
Many similar materials devoted to a problem previously unknown to people, which, according to experts' forecasts, will become the "plague of the 21st century", begin with approximately the same words.
Dr. Kimberly Young, director of the University of Pittsburgh-Bradford's Center for Internet Addiction (University of Pittsburgh-Bradford), who has studied more than 400 cases of the problem, believes that anyone with access to a modem and an Internet connection can become Internet addicted, with the greatest risk being home computer owners. According to Young, the typical Internet addict, contrary to the prevailing stereotype of a computer scientist, is a woman or man in his mid-thirties with an average educational level. According to preliminary estimates, 1 to 5 percent of Internet users have become addicted to it.
Various forms of addiction are distinguished according to the principle of preferential choice of sites: addiction to virtual sex and viewing pornography, intrusive shopping on the Internet, frequent visits to virtual casinos, chaotic communication in chats and forums, and so on. Here are some of the symptoms of internet addiction (in order of increasing severity):
1) checking mail too often;
2) reducing the time for eating at work and at home, eating in front of the monitor;
3) access to the Internet in the course of unrelated work;
4) complaints from others about your excessive long sitting at the computer;
5) loss of sense of time on-line;
6) more frequent communication with people on-line than in person;
7) constant anticipation of the next on-line session or memories of the previous one;
8) ignoring family and work responsibilities, social life, scientific activities or the state of their health in connection with the depth of the Internet;
9) impossibility to reduce the time spent on the Internet;
10) skipping food, classes, meetings or restricting sleep for the sake of being able to be on the Internet;
11) logging into the Internet in order to avoid problems or drown out feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety or depression;
12) the appearance of fatigue, irritability, decreased mood when you stop using the Internet and an irresistible desire to return to the computer;
13) "secret" access to the Internet at the time of the absence of a spouse or other family members, accompanied by a feeling of relief or guilt;
14) denial of the presence of addiction.
Not a single scientist denies the unconditional benefits of the Internet and the World Wide Web in general, but many of them warn of the real danger of a harmful psychological dependence on virtual technology.
New opportunities also entail unexplored risks. Once upon a time it was customary to decorate household appliances with radioactive paints glowing in the dark, and even earlier, mercury was considered a medicine … New Internet technologies also give rise to addiction akin to drug addiction. The easy accessibility of the World Wide Web provokes a kind of "spider hunger" among PC users - not spiritual, but informational, when a person on the Internet consumes not works of art, not even some useful information, but information that is completely insignificant for him. Where did the "fly" fly, and what was the "neighbor" thinking at that time … agree, incredibly valuable news!
The ease of access to information on the Internet gives rise to bodily laziness, the radiation of the monitor, coupled with an overloaded bright flashing nonsense brain, kind of dilutes the will. Well-being and health suffers, and often the very taste for ordinary life, real life, the very life in which you are by no means a "Spider-Man", but more and more, unfortunately, turn into a brainless manipulated invertebrate …
