THE MAVERICK’S CORNER
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that can put what we think is the right distance between us and the world. It’s such a paradox. We live when we are online! A few years back, someone created a social experiment - luckily not so successful - called Second Life. It wasn’t just a game, nor a website: it was - and it is - a real second life, where our virtual self can go shopping, buy a house, a car…with our real money we pay for our doppelganger, for who we’d like to be but can’t, in the real world. That project was an anticipation of what happened a little time later with Facebook and Twitter. A negative aspect of modern We practically live joined to our We send tweets about history is that people want to be smartphones that take pictures and ubiquitous, meaning that they videos, making us feeling alive in the where we’re going, what we are eating, who we want to participate in public instance of a connection. are meeting or what’s events to show off. Driven by important for us, even if it’s not for the their only desire to stand out, we could explain this attitude by recognizing a growing need to be admitted, acknowledged rest of the world. by someone else. We feel alive if we are considered. If not, the virtual death is not so different from the physical one. Being Social networks are full of cats, absent is negative, being present is essential. We must be dogs and birds that apparently are the most beautiful and intelligent there, even if we don’t know exactly where. of the world and can do something We must be live. We live to tell everyone that we are alive. unique…like thousands more on the However, to do so, we hide behind a nickname, we wear a mask internet. moral obligation to partake in some events? I don’t understand this will of being necessarily there, this new imperative to “have it all and now”, as if a postponed research would ruin our existence. Ultimately, there’s always an anxiety to be the first to arrive, to catch something that is inevitably too far from us and makes sense only if shared. Only if screamed together, danced together, remember the key word: participation. What about the pleasure of silence? Of those precious moments while reading a book in a calm afternoon in summer? Or the ones lived under a beech tree, while playing a soft music that Tityrus considered as a merciful peace of a God? What about the tales and stories whispered by the fireplace? Where’s the calm that guided the old philosophers? Men and women, who isolated themselves from the chaos to give birth to some of the most important thoughts of our society.
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