Think Piece

    Time has witnessed the increasing ease of sending a message to the one we care about. At the same time, it has witnessed individuals become more careless in sending messages and expressing themselves. We had a hard time expressing our feeling to the person we love afar face to face, while we are also having much more ease in expressing ourselves in cyberspace with the boom of instant message apps. With WhatsApp, and Wechat, we can send dozens of messages to our loved ones far away, we are also losing the purposefulness and attention in wording and phrasing our messages. We type messages fast and hit the “send” button in a rush because we know we can retrieve the message using the latest “recall” feature. This could not happen when we are using a typewriter or writing mail with pen and paper. Before, we think twice before typing a letter or writing a character because we know what it takes physically in getting the message conveyed, and thus we take it seriously. At the moment, people no longer take expressing themselves seriously as we did before, getting rid of all the romance and redundancy simultaneously.

    Technology is shaping how we express ourselves, negatively. The boom of meditation as a lifestyle is combatting this tendency, helping us to retrieve a more mindful, present living experience. So are many devices artists and designers create. For example, the manual reader by Ishac Bertran reflects on the issue of information overload, adding physical edges to digital information to increase people’s perception(Bertran, 2014). The slow game takes one move a day and discusses the consequent fast pace technology instills in us(Bertran, 2014).