Alone in Paradise

The average person spends 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day. Does this surprise you? The average American checks their mobile device 159 times a day. Is that a lot? 93% of marketers use Facebook for advertising.
Isn't that obvious?

Social media is present in our lives. Since we spend so much time there, business sees our attention there too. And this will not change. Whether we like it or not. It is even predicted that there will be even greater engagement and we will spend even more time in front of phones (by the way, they have long ceased to be just phones).

A few years ago, the media spread the news that fashion houses promoted a specific type of beauty. Beautiful, slender women and men sculpted like Apollo presented the latest collections of clothes and accessories. Even numerous brands were creating this image as desirable and proper. This came from a simple dependency - the target group simply wanted to see themselves like that and by buying a piece of clothing they fulfilled their need. At some point, numerous critical campaigns appeared saying that this cannot be done. You have to be real. But what does it mean to be real in the media? What does it mean to be real in social media?

Technology gives us the opportunity to create a reality different than it is.

Apart from huge economic and demography losses, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused us another great harm. It has very negatively affected the psychological and sociological behavior of societies. Various studies point to the effects of isolation, dopamine platforms, and remote life. Most likely in the coming years we will have campaigns to fight loneliness online, loneliness in paradise.

This brings me to a certain reflection, a question that haunts me. If people in previous industrial revolutions voluntarily (consciously or not) changed their place of residence from free and civilized villages to cities and achieved greater benefits than losses, then is this migration from the real world to the virtual one simply natural? Won't we see more benefits than negatives? For example, we know how forcibly reversing this trend historically ended in the People's Republic of China during Mao's time. Maybe it's worth considering not how to prohibit but how to adopt.

Photo taken in Cambodia in 2018.

I dedicate it to all those who find a balance between the real and virtual world and can separate these two worlds.