Lights, Camera, Action!

Hello, and welcome to the world of many lights and much camera, but very little action.

We’re so image-obsessed today it’s disturbing. Humans have always felt the desire to be seen and heard, but the internet and social media (Facebook being the forerunner of the pack, with Twitter following closely behind) have taken the fire that satellite television kindled and set the world ablaze. In the twinkle of an eye you can let the world know your secrets and your thoughts, and five degrees of separation has been reduced to nil.

Take the desire to be known and put it together with the platform for doing so, and what you get is a lot of falsehood. There are too many words and too little action - this is the trap into which my generation is falling, myself included. We’re saying things we don’t mean, laughing out loud with blank expressions on our faces, and our wittiest comments are made with our fingers! This is the age where laziness has taken over and enthusiasm has been reduced to half a dozen exclamation marks!!!!!! I dare say we are living a lie and we are in trouble.

I knew I was doomed when a witty thought would come into my head and the following thought would be, “wow, that would make a great Facebook status update”.

You, yes, you with all those carefully selected and touched up photos in your photo albums (and I’m talking to myself too) – who are we deceiving? Bar those who haven’t seen you in the past five years, we all know you don’t look like that now!

And those of us who spend hours on Facebook looking at other people’s pictures – scrutinizing, criticizing, lusting – we need to get lives, or live the lives we already have.

Our generation’s opportunities are exponentially greater than those of the generations before us, and we are wasting our lives in my opinion. I am certainly not anti social media. I appreciate it’s value and the platform it has created for us, but the greater proportion of the world is misusing it. When you have something important to say; a brilliant product to promote, please feel free to broadcast yourself as much as you want to, but if all you want to do is rant about your ex, or tweet subliminal insults to his new girlfriend, please refrain from

clogging up cyberspace.

I reckon that those who are actually doing things are too busy to spend the bulk of twenty-four hours online. A blogger I follow once said (paraphrase) – let’s get off the internet and make some real memories.

To that I add “let’s shut down our laptops (put down those damn Blackberries) and go and get some fresh air! Rest our fingers! See the world! Be all we can be!”

Less lights and camera and more action please!

That’s That!