Natives or digital migrants? If your first impulse is to touch the screen whenever you grab a device, there are no doubts: you belong to the first category.
If your kids need to explain you what an app is, well then obviously you are part of the second one and in a pretty critical phase, too. If instead, you are managing technology pretty well, but when you were a teen you were playing Snake instead of Candy Crush, then you are halfway: you grew up with the digital era growing with you.
You can definitely say that there is a generational gap between the two categories. But there is something that we all have in common: the addiction to screens and virtual reality. How many times, while in the underground, have you lifted you head up and realized that everyone else was looking at the phone in their hands? We never go out without it. It is our sixth sense, our portable encyclopedia, a portal to the world.
Antoine Geiger, help: they are sucking my soul!
Antoine Geiger is a very young French photographer (born in 1995), that focuses his work on mankind. Browsing his website or his Tumblr page, you can see feminine and masculine faces. There is also a true investigation on reality, and how people interact with the outer world, how this world is connected in an invisible way with them.
Recently, he took some pictures of people looking at their devices (tablet, smartphones). He then modified these pictures, giving them a particular effect: from these pictures, it looks like people’s faces are being sucked by their devices. It is impressive. Geiger is just 20, but he has received attention from the entire world. What is he telling us? “We press a button, screen turns on, and it’s like the whole physical world is frozen. The show can start. In the end we only escape from ourselves”.
The project is called sur-fake and would like to express the serious addiction that we have to digital. The screen is the object of the mass culture, of the 21st century civilization, alienated and alienating, where people have no perception of what is happening around them.
The digital world is also a way to escape from reality. Each of us has an alter ego, a virtual dimension, that satisfice us but that cannot make us less likely to a human being. Not even Death Eaters or Chupacapra could have engineered something better.
My virtual boyfriend: beyond reality
So what is the point? No one reads, people talk less and things are not as they used to be? That is fine, those are old common phrases, but let us stop and think about it. Haven’t we gone too far? Let us take My virtual boyfriend, the app that allows you to create your ideal boyfriend. You can feed him, cuddle him, it is like a modern Tamagotchi. Thank God not all of us have gone so far. This morning I lifted my head in the tram and there were just three people with a smartphone in their hands (there were 20 people in the tram, so it’s a good result). Many cannot help it, though, because they work with digital devices.
The work of Geiger is very provocative, he is sending us a message, loud and clear. Let us try to set boundaries to ourselves. Pastel colors of a borough in Cinque Terre will not be lightened up by an Instagram effect. They are a piece of history that is brought to life by our eyes. We are not what our Facebook page says we are, and our thoughts are not only the ones we tweet. A profile picture cannot feel cold or eat instead of us.
Is our relation with reality changing? Maybe it has already happened. Anyway, check the weather outside the window, talk with your friends and read a good book. You will never know.
Livia Del Pino
Rifletto spesso sull'onesta reazione di Mark Twain a una domanda insidiosa: "I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know". Inseguo la conoscenza, chimera irraggiungibile, convinta che la bellezza sia proprio nel viaggio.
