Читать книгу Homo Cypiens - Herlander Elias - Страница 15

In this society of information and capital most people are obsessed with their diets, their fitness programs, their habits management programs on their smartphones. In this way, we are all actors in a system. Our performance is very important, and it is monitored by ourselves. We are interested in looking good on Instagram and Facebook. We are worried about the image we are transmitting. We are vain managers of our own lives and so we like to have good images. We are actors in networks of services and images. We're always online and we never hang up. We are celebrities and sportsmen, network professionals and digital users, always in line with the world.

We belong to a new generation ― one that has grown, lives and will age with digital devices because we are really in the age of the network. We even went so far that we do not to buy things in stores but we subscribe them. We are all “hirers”, leasers and renters. The reality we deal with is like a long-stay hotel. Nothing or nobody belongs to anyone. Everything is only ours while we pay a monthly fee. And the world is looking at us. We are elite performers. What we do and what we are, what we eat and buy, all our habits are shared on the net. We want at all costs to know the result of appreciation of what we do. We look like children asking for our parents’ attention in a fast-moving, online-friendly world. In this type of life only seems to matter to the majority of the public having fans, to be productive, to manage well the time, to advise others, to be known and being an elite performer in every field.

We are also hostages of a digital ecosystem, of brands and sexy products, and we are interested in everything that happens around us by abdicating offices, companies and schools. We are a legion and we manage legions of fans. We have our channels on YouTube and on Vimeo, Twitter and Facebook. We are eager for people with new ideas. We are connected by network screens, new seductive computing devices. We do not have cable connection. We work with the cloud and we believe we are being evaluated by third parties. We want to have more and more friends. We want to have everything, which is to say that we are elite performers, we are on the network feeling ambitious, social and audacious, shrewd and constantly connected. Once again we realize that we do not know what it is to live without a network, without media ― we use our network screens to feel great on the web and we look forward to having everything we are entitled to. We are engaged in a fashionable virtual reality and we love gadgets that allow us to have the best performance in the great social and technical milieu of the Internet which has turned into a support tool.

The younger generations continue this extension and want the network to become a visual band for their lives. Now we are all critical and social, productive and actors in a system of attractive brands, wishing to know everything and everyone. We are retained in a macro-medium called the Internet and we no longer know what it is to live in an age without media, without users and fans, without content and movies, music and fashion, shopping malls and futuristic vehicles. We love having followers and following personalities online. We like to learn, but we despise books; we have a lot of information, but we do not go to libraries. We are an informed, negligent, proactive and hyperactive species, and we are consumers and informants simultaneously. We are always busy in the network but at the same time we feel dissatisfied, frustrated and depressed. Nothing seems to ever be sufficient. The network has made us to get used to wanting more and doing more. We are homo cypiens,the privileged species of the Net. We feel anxious when we can not get online. In short, for us the network is the main good of necessity as we need to show ourselves and to be connected, we need to know that we can turn on our search engines and find out what we like. We are curious and active. Yet, we have a problem while users, we can not cut calls, we can not hang up. The anxiety is big and so we have to show to the world what we are worth, resulting in an almost daily mission to have to inform the social about our value. We are elite performers and belong to a post-postmodern society based on transparency ― everything is known. We lost for good the big narrative and now our micro-stories, the fantasies of the media and the transmedia films are enough for us. We love being “searchers”. What exists, if it exists, is online. All we have to do is to search, but the problem is that there is a lot of pre-media era data that is not online, and that it stays out, perhaps temporarily, from the network screens.