La Voz de Galicia – October 14, 2022 →
My cell phone (like many others) informs me, without my requesting it, about the number of hours I spend on it. Each Sunday, there appears a notification that tells me whether I increased or decreased my time compared to the previous week, and each Sunday I notice, astounded, the number of minutes devoted to I don’t quite know what. I try to be disciplined and use it only for what I think I need, but just the same I spend an average of two hours a day not doing anything with it. And during these days, I started to think that I no longer remember what my life was like without a phone that is good for everything: to save time and waste it; to search for information and not learn it; to avoid getting lost and winding up lost…Two hours a day are fourteen hours a week, hours that could be spent on more important things, like wondering, reading a book, or talking more with Maruxa. Perhaps the part that hurts the most about these lost hours is that one ends up tired, and with the feeling that this time won’t return, and that without meaning to, one is there, paralyzed, staring at a device looking for things that are not particularly useful
The thing is that I could not live without it either. Seeing my family daily is only possible because of my cell phone. For this reason, I can’t even imagine what would happen if, suddenly, that double-threaded weapon that is the internet, the same one that accompanies us everywhere through our cell, that one that is always listening to us, would disappear. What would happen if political, economic, and social powers would stop using it to manipulate us…Because fourteen hours a week could be spent on many things, among them: disconnecting from the cyberworld to understand that there is no turning back, and on the way connecting anew with oneself.
