The Truth About Your Uniqueness According to the Internet By Tatiana Díaz de León
I
36 | Technology
t’s difficult to fully comprehend how many people are truly connected through the internet. We can only really comprehend the amount of people we see through our own eyes on a daily basis- the community around us on school campus, at the store, at the beach, at a concert. We know there’s much more made possible by the internet and the digital sphere, but that’s only as real as our imagination lets us envision in our minds within a single thought and image.
much easier to set ourselves apart from others. Sure, we might have played the same sports or participated in the same activities as some of the other kids, but we screamed out our own stories. We were proud (or ashamed) of these storiesbut we screamed them, confident that we were special in our little societies. We screamed them hesitantly, hoping that someone in our little worlds was in the same exact boat. What were the odds? Not that great.
Living in communities and not as an isolated human on a secluded island means we inevitably compare ourselves to other people around us, whether it’s harsh or gentle. When we were kids before we knew what the internet was - all we had to compare ourselves to were the people we saw everyday, in our classes and in our neighborhoods. In our tiny storybook societies (as compared to a much larger scale now), it was
And when I refer to stories, I don’t just mean your family situation or the hobbies you shared with some friends. I mean the stories we might not have even come face yet. The stories we were only able to discover via the internet and the stories that our tiny physical societies limited and sheltered us from, dormant parts of ourselves only awakened by the magical tool of being able to broaden your worldly perspectives through a screen. Diverse