Are You Really Experiencing Life?

I've been thinking a lot about technology lately.

One thing that really made me start thinking about it more and more was something that happened to me the other day at the art gallery.

I was in Patricia Piccinini's exhibit at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (for those of you who live in and around Brissy, definitely worth seeing) and was gazing at one of her more powerful sculptures about how blurred the line between technology and our lives have become.

A big part of Piccinini's work centres around this topic, about how we no longer have technology but we are technology, especially focusing on genetic engineering and science, shown pretty strongly in her sculpture 'young family'.

Anyway, I was standing there admiring her work when I suddenly had a look around at the other people who were all admiring it also. Not one of them, except for myself, walked past this particular sculpture without stopping to take a photo of it on their iPhones.
Hell, a lot of the people didn't even stop to take the art in, or read the inscriptions on the wall. They just walked, from piece to piece, snapping a photo of each one.

I couldn't help thinking that while art galleries are a place to go to expand and enhance your mind, these people were more focused on expanding and enhancing their Instagram accounts!

My question is this; to what extend is technology ruining our ability to experience life?

I am a big believer that when you are with someone, out in the world, looking at some art or experiencing a music concert, a film, a show, that phones are a no go.
Yes, I will take my phone out to perhaps take a photo of a beautiful landscape I have come across, but I won't just do that and walk away. However, not everyone is like that.

Next time you go to a restaurant, a play, a concert, just take a second. Have a look around and see how many people are sitting their absentmindedly staring at their phone screens, living their life THROUGH their phone screens.
Whether they are taking a photo, checking Facebook or even just blindly checking their phones for notifications.

How many of these people can truly be experiencing where they are, what their food tastes like in their mouth, enjoying the company of the people that they are with?

There are a lot of people that focus on the negative effect that social media has on our mental health, a lot of articles on the negative physical effects of our mobile devices. But my issue is the negative effect on our actual quality of life....

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