Sections
Highlight
Manuel Vilas
Friday, 9 August 2024, 17:09
This has only just begun. The screens, I mean. You're on the beach on holiday, or in the mountains, in front of an amazing ... landscape full of natural beauty and you have an unstoppable urge to look at your mobile phone. Either you take pictures or you end up looking at the photos of others on social media. You have in front of you the Aneto peak or the beach of La Lanzada in Galicia, or the beach of Genoveses in Almeria, or the Empire State Building in New York and the first thing you do is to draw your revolver. Some people find this dependence on the smartphone terrible and an unmistakable symptom of our decadence. But we have always been in decline. The history of Western civilisation is based on thinking all day long that decadence is coming upon us. In schools and colleges, students are forced to put away their mobile phones. It is worth remembering that smartphones have been with us for barely 15 years. Some people think that Napoleon had one. Or that Jesus Christ called God with a mobile phone.
A world without mobile phones seems inconceivable to us. If my mobile was stolen or lost, I would have to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital because I would have a panic attack of a cosmic nature. We are in the infancy of technology. I've said it before: just 15 years old. And we must get it right with this toy, we're like a baby with its first rattle. However, it seems to me a triumph of human comedy to see tourists on the beach looking at their mobiles and not at the beach. The truth is that I die laughing, because it happens to me too. They serve you a spectacular paella and instead of starting to eat it you take its picture. And this will increase. Because at the end of the day the most beautiful seas, the most imposing mountains, the great and sophisticated cities, the most important museums in the world do not allow themselves to be touched, they do not obey you, but mobile phones do. And in the future they will do more things.
The wonders our grandchildren will see are unimaginable. Send a WhatsApp to Napoleon and tell him not to go to Waterloo. Send a WhatsApp to Federico García Lorca and tell him to leave Granada immediately.
No one has said it yet, or at least I have not heard anyone say it: technology is more comic than tragic. Human beings do not know how to live without addictions. We are addicted to money, to work, to success, to love, to soccer. Life without addictions is inconceivable to us. If you don't have a mobile phone, I fear the worst, I fear you are already dead.
¿Ya eres suscriptor/a? Inicia sesión
Publicidad
Publicidad
Publicidad
Publicidad
Esta funcionalidad es exclusiva para registrados.
Reporta un error en esta noticia
Comentar es una ventaja exclusiva para registrados
¿Ya eres registrado?
Inicia sesiónNecesitas ser suscriptor para poder votar.