Magazine/April, 2013 9
Now a days, everything is going fast (fast-food, fast trip, fast money, fast relationship...) people never take time. Our generation is in a disposable mood. You can take and then throw it away, for example marriage and divorce. Impatient, every thing has to be quick and if you don’t like something you change like that. for example on Youtube : you are looking a video and if in the 10 fist second you don’t like it you change. as well for TV, here is the zapping generation.
YOLO (you only live ones) is the new world youth people use as CARPE DIEM, I have heard that here in London. This acronym is used by the youth culture and music industry.
You Only Live Ones show us how our generation feels about doubt or life. How people can be scared of being bored, or of having any regrets.
Do what you want.
Michel Serres is a french Philosopher and author born in 1930 he wrote several books and essays. The last one he book was about the our new generation : he baptized it Small Inch, for his capacity to send SMS with his inch. It is the schoolboy, the student one of today, which lives a tsunami so much the world changes around them.
The french magazine «liberation» says : We currently know a period of immense swing, comparable at the end of the Roman Empire for example.
Michel Serres claims indulgence for the young people, obliged all to reinvent in a company upset by new technologies. For him, the great turning is in the years 1965-1975, with the country cut, when nature, our mother, became our daughter. Living space changed, and with him “the being in the world”, that the German philosophers as Heidegger thought immutable.
For Michel, Small Inch do not speak any more his language. Theirs is richer, he note it with the French Academy where, since Richelieu, about every forty years the dictionary of the French language is published. At the previous century, the difference between two editions was established to 4,000 or 5,000 words. Between most recent and the next one, it will be approximately 30,000 words. This rhythm, our successors will be very quickly as far from us as we are it of old French!
Our Western society already lived two great revolutions: the passage of the oral examination to the writing, then writing with the printed paper form. The third is the passage of the printed paper form to new technologies, quite as major.
That applies to all the fields. With the former generation, a science teacher in the Sorbonne transmitted almost 70% of what he had learned over the same benches twenty or thirty years earlier. Raised and teaching lived in the same world. Today, 80% of what learned this professor is obsolete. And even for the 20% which remain, the professor is not essen- tial any more, because one can all know without leaving home!
The only way of approaching the consequences of all these changes, it is to suspend its judgement. The idealists see a progress, the grumblers, a catastrophe. For Michel Serre, it is neither well neither badly, neither a progress nor a catastrophe, it is reality and it is necessary to make with.
But them, «the X generation», sums responsible about the new generation he talks about, and if he do the portrait of old generation it would not be flattering. he feels necessary to grant much benevolence to them, because it enters the era of the individual, alone in the world.
For him : «Loneliness is the photography of the modern world, however over-populated.»
I agreed with him in a sense that we spend more and more time with our computer and phone. but in a same time I think that it is not a proof of loneliness because the modern world engage us to be more sociable and linked each other though different social network for example.
Regarding Sherry Turkle in his book "Alone Togather", "Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall pray to the illation of companionship, gathering thousands of twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall post with authentic communication."
People show sometimes same importance to their phones as they would to their friends, family or lovers.
They spend more time on their phones even if they is "real" human in the same room.