“I forgot my phone” directed by Miles Crawford

#Night digressions.

How the smartphone is radically changing the social structure.

It’s Saturday night. Usually years ago at this time I was most likely in some club in Bologna filling myself with cocktails and devastating myself with electronic music. Lately it’s happening less and less, will it be linked to the fact that I’m getting old? Will it be linked to the fact that I am moving further and further away from material goods? I don’t know what the most plausible answer is. I know I ‘m fine . It doesn’t matter if it’s Saturday night and I’m here writing. I love to write .

A lot has happened in this summer 2013, I’m changing. I am changing the vision of life that I have had up to now and my spiritual part thanks. I haven’t felt this alive in years. To whom do I owe this enthusiasm? To my passion for art that keeps me alive and never makes me switch off my brain and creativity. I have always been a curious person and eager to explore the world. All this helped, I believe, to avoid becoming what many of my peers today are: digital zombies.

The last ten years have undergone a leap forward of at least 50 in the technological field, and the results are beginning to be seen. And I have always been passionate about technology, without which I could not carry on my creative company. But I feel around me an exaggeration, a run-up, an uninterrupted flow of information and appearance that has destroyed every type of relationship within the social structure of man ( I was already talking about it years ago in some of my poems ).

When I was little I would go out, warn my mom and come back at the scheduled time. I took my shiny new bicycle, gathered friends and every day we invented something new from nothing to pass our days: we were friends. Today for many of us there is a new best friend: the smartphone. I stop for a moment, I might seem like an old man from a certain point of view who denies technological evolution. I don’t deny it at all, on the contrary, I support it. But I can’t stand the spread of ignorance that is developing hand in hand around me.

Here is a typical scene:

I guess I’m not the only one who has come across this situation. It often happens to me. I look around and see people who don’t speak to each other. They stare at their smartphone screen and slowly let the time pass helplessly. And so it happens that one day I happened to ask some 13-year-old boys some questions about music; I asked them how many songs they had available on their smartphone: they all replied “thousands”, “I have the complete discography of xxx” and so on. But none of them had ever stopped to seriously listen to that music, criticizing it, discussing it with friends, analyzing it and sharing it. A bit like my generation and I did many years ago. Am I degenerating? I do not know. I don’t know what sense to give to this nocturnal post. Which one would you give him? How do you see the situation? What is your relationship with the smartphone?

There is a certainty in me. I will support the technology, but adapt it to my needs. Here, perhaps this is one of the crucial points. The smartphone is radically changing our social structure because we (as a society) make it so that it changes our habits, our social relationships, makes us put appearance, materialism and unbridled consumerism first, leaving aside the I will be a utopian, but I see a revolution. A new renaissance in which the arts will again be an essential and fundamental part of our lives supported by the best technology conformed to our needs, in which we will finally not be just passive and obsessive consumers.

Now I’m off. I have an important date with my next future singing teacher . He certainly did not need the Smartphone, his voice full of emotions and great social communication was enough.

Night.