There is no particular noise in the room, there are no particular things I would be trying to do aside from writing, but indeed in my efforts to lead a structured research, I keep on getting lost every other moment. One open website leads me to another, until the series of opened windows in my browser are far from the subject of my thesis and instead, I end up getting lost in pointless corners of my endless internet database. I instantly grab my phone, I grab it even when it is not ringing or beeping or vibrating, even when it doesn’t give me any obvious signs of new information, no input, no messages, nothing.

I am the shameful, yet a stereotypical victim of this Digital era. I am the generation living through the transformation; knowing the good old values , but interacting with the tempting new, whilst trying to make some sense out of the overwhelming chaos of information and entertainment.
I feel so vulnerable. Exposed to the beguiling and captivating range of online dissipation, swamped by the noise of all the frolic opportunities awaiting me inside all the blinking devices. The sprouts of the incessant capitalistic technology revolution making us update and share our lives every moment. The former generation, the Baby Boomers and even the Generation X, cannot possibly conceive the struggle. From the outside, it seems to be only the lack of our discipline and emotional perseverance. They ask each other what went wrong with the rising human breeding as they witness their children spending days and nights in front of their blue screens. They brag about their early ambitions for having their own company, willing to work hard for it whatever it took, while they still managed to start and take care of their families. The difference seems to be they didn’t use to expect their lives to be fun or unbound, they wanted to leave something behind and the entertainment in life came secondary (or actually last).

On the contrary, it seems that the Generation Z coming after us is exposed to smartphones in the womb, operating an iPad before they can even say their first word and ask for milk without their means of communication being the primitive crying. Their way of thinking might be therefore progressively developed from the early age, potentially better adapted to the mechanisms of computer brain. They might know exactly how to orient themselves through the digital jungle, and they don’t feel the need to step back, but we, the Millennials, are still comparing the life before our everyday lives took over the simulating technology devices, because we are the last generation that really knows the difference. We have been soon enough exposed to the prospects of the world working on data collecting and algorhythms, so we are ultimately involved, being first of all the triggers and at the same time targets of social networking. Similarly to the Generation Z, we follow and utilise the latest gadget offers and digital novelty like a dry fly on fruit cordial , being it us who jump out of their cars in the middle of the city roads to catch a Pokemon, snapchat our intimate kiss to show how much in love we are or almost gouge out people’s eyes when taking out a selfie stick on the crowded top of Eiffel Tour. However, we have been still raised in the world of tree houses rather than collecting fictional computer game trophies. We still believe in meeting people by shaking hands first before double-tapping on their Tinder profiles. We still feel slightly ashamed to admit that we chose to run on a running simulator instead of taking a trail in the forest behind the gym.

Our needs for the concrete correlate with the digital. The real correlates with the virtual. We are the ones that really live right through the transformation and like in any other transmission from one historical period to another, there is an unstructured chaos in this invention. We are the ones that can choose to direct the future. Our future should ideally consist of the beneficial originating from the old and uprising from the new.

So what is it that we want to keep from the old values implemented in this new digital world in order to keep our social human structures balanced? How do we really keep this place human and what does that even mean?