Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

The fact that we live in the digital age is not just a silly advertisement. It is a harsh reality... Everything around us is done through the internet, through mobile phones and of course through social networks! A new fashion... If you do not have a page on at least one social networking medium, people look at you as if you came from another planet! We spend our whole day over the computer and update our status every five minutes. What exactly we are doing, why we are doing it, where we are, who we are with, what mood we are in... Everything! And if we manage to convince a friend to peel himself away from the computer, there are also the applications on our mobile phones, so that we can inform the rest of our friends about what we are doing at this very moment! I wonder how many of our thousands of virtual friends are truly interested in what we are doing at that moment? I am sure we can count them on our fingers... I faintly remember the time when very few people had the internet, and if they did have it they did not know exactly why they had installed it and what use it would be to them... And even more faintly I remember the time when there were no mobile phones. We all used our landline phone and it was more than enough for us to talk with our friends as much as we needed. For anything more, we arranged to meet in person! The whole group would gather somewhere outside for coffee or, even better, at someone’s house to watch a movie or play a board game... Now we sit and play online games with our friends, each person at home, in front of a screen, and if we win we put it in our status so that people can give us a like or tell us well done... How lonely that sounds, almost depressing! We no longer telephone to see whether our friend is well, and if we have something to tell him we know that we will certainly see him “online” in some chat in the evening after work... And when we meet in person after a long time, we look carefully at each other to see what has changed since the last time we met... Sometimes I think that we do not really live... We use borrowed money to pay for our fleeting amusements, we live in borrowed houses because that kind of house suits our circle, and we spend all our free time in the virtual reality called internet, facebook, twitter... And I say virtual because most, if not all, of what takes place on social networking pages is false. Of course I am not excluding myself; like everyone else, I too have entered this vicious circle, whether I wanted to or not... If we continue like this, I very much fear that in a few years, instead of looking at photographs of the good old moments with friends, we will be looking at lists of the best status updates. The day before yesterday a friend said to me, shall I tell you a little verse or maxim so that your friends will give you many likes? And I answered him, can you give me advice on how to become a better person? That will certainly be more useful to me than attracting the attention of a group of people for a short period of time. I would prefer to tell a nice joke one evening at a gathering of some good friends, together with good wine! When I will be looking them in the eyes as they laugh with all their heart at my joke, or as they tease me because, being blonde, I said something silly... That is how we ought to live. Close to one another, not exchanging emails with wishes every time we celebrate a name day or have a birthday! Technology is good, for heaven’s sake; it has helped us with its achievements, and I am sure that in the coming years it will help us even more. But it must not change what we are. Because we are human beings and we need human communication and contact, face to face, not the coldness of emails, where in order to understand the tone of the text we wait to see some little face that declares emotion! All emotions are in our eyes, in our face, in body language! And only there should we seek them... So the next time you are sitting alone at home in front of a computer, think that at that very moment precious minutes of your life are passing by and will never come back! And perhaps at that moment they do not seem important to us because of our young age, but after a few years we will certainly wish that we had spent more time with our loved ones. So do not waste time... Live your life as you deserve...