The impact of Technology in our lives

Few days back I was watching on TV a documentary about Bhutan on how technology has been charging the lives and even cultural values in a country where internet and TV came to the country very recently...

If you are not familiar with Bhutan, just take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutan

Coming back to the issue: imagine life in a place where there is neither TV nor internet. First thing which comes to my mind is that people have more time available to socialize, to expend with their families and communities, their consumption needs are very limited and at the end their cultural values are kept.

Now put TV and internet in the picture: the flow of information exchanged have a huge impact on people's lives which naturally happens anywhere else but the effects are diluted over the time if it comes in small doses. What happens today in Bhutan is that cultural values have been swept out in a speed that makes people feel like felt from a train in a high speed.

Only a few examples:
* Consumption: till recently if one needed a shampoo one only went to the supermarket and took whatever available. Now one wants brands: L'Oreal, Pantene, etc cause one saw it on the TV. Same happens with any other product.
* Cloths: traditional clothes are being left behind. More and more its youth are looking like westerners.
 
* Quality time: people used to expend more time with their families. Nowadays they prefer to watch TV or surf in internet
* Values: the "I don't need this, so I share" is becoming "I want more". Simple life is dying!
and the list goes...

It made me think how my life looked like before the web.
Maybe 5 years back in time (when I was still living in Brazil) I had only MSN with not more than 10 friends... Remember that my first interaction in the web was in some chat rooms organized by the internet service provider which were divided in categories like: culture, movies, music, cities, sex, etc...
On top of that read some news site and watched a lot of porn movies. Nobody is perfect, right?!
Summary: chat, news, porn movies... I didn't expend more than 30 min daily on it.

Then I moved alone to Asia, to a place where naturally I didn't know anyone. In the first two years, from one side I had to travel a lot once I'd got to know the 10 companies I was in charge spread over 10 countries, but from other side apart from the times I was travelling I had nothing to do, no one to talk. If I went out it was by myself. It was really the loneliest moment of my life. A stranger to the country, to its people, to its culture, to its culinary and even to myself.

As time passed the travels reduced their volume and I had to find something to do. Found a group of friends and started to socialize... All of them, without exception had facebook and were connected to one another and to all other sort of  sites: culture, dating, news etc.
I had never listened about facebook before and once I was in there was no way to stay at home once every day some friend posted some invitation on facebook and there was party again... and more people, more postings, more happenings... It was a revolution.

The interactivity provided by this kind of social networking website is amazing with all its links to news, games, events, the possibility to add friends of all around the world really changed my life and my habits. 


Nowadays I have it all: 



It can easily keep me busy for hours in a row and to find a balance between it and the other stuff like work, gym, sports and quality time with friends, partner and family is really a challenge which I am still figuring out the better way to do it.




Daily web routine


It starts with the reading of e-mails and facebook postings, then the games: you can easily keep busy with the wild range of games online. In my case only two: (trust me: it is enough to keep u busy for at least 1h30m)
   and 

Then I go to the news:


If I don't control my time when I realize is already gone 4 hours...

The amazing volume and speed of information exchange is something never seeing before... simple pleasures like just seat in a bar with some friends and expend hours discussing who won the championship in the year 1978 don't exist anymore. Someone will fatally "google" it and in  a few seconds discussion is over...

I cannot imagine my life without web. Is this a revolution or not?