As usual, you are woken up at 5:00 AM by the alarm you set with your smart phone. The day normally starts at daybreak, but since long ago, your day and night have been monitored by your phone. With your mobile phone, everything seems to fall in line. Your 30 minute exercise time is not an exception since it is accompanied by the podcast from your phone. The Internet-connected phone gives you a multitude of choice from YouTube. You jog around the neighborhood ingesting the recent analysis of national and regional events and head back home. Immediately after that you tune to a meditation channel to get guidance from the gurus of the field. In the 30 minutes your body transforms from a running machine to a calm one in the silent ambiance. Then follows half an hour of learning time still from a PDF document you stored in the phone. Your cooking is also done with the help of a popular YouTube channel you subscribed. Even while having breakfast you listen to calming music. What follows is checking news and views for the day. This is done from none other than Facebook. You open and surf the major pages you liked. Your digital friends’ posts cover your news feed. Having seen this you learn something about your town, region and the country. Then you thank the digital media for being such a guide in what otherwise would have been a darkness of information. You think you don’t have such a friend to trust in like your smartphone. Even if your friends call it stupid phone, you don’t care! They say you are getting more and more stupid so far as not having actual friends or cutting relationships with existing ones. Social media is your refuge in times of depression and worry. On this day, as planned, you decide to go from your place to another one and make the necessary preparations. You got your identification card, money, clothes and everything. This is not the priority though. A while back you heard that your phone’s gallery has to be free from any photos to do with politics, history, patriotism or just anything that discloses your views on related issues. You clean your phone by deleting the photos, videos and audio files. The ones you need for your future reference you send to your computer. The text messages you sent or received have to be checked and cleared. As a final step, you go to the message your friend sent you a week ago and check what he wrote you should do before you leave your house at such times. That message you didn’t give attention at that time proves really critical now. You read that the armed men who stop you on your way could ask for your Facebook account and check your news feed. Not only that, they would also check the likes, comments and shares in your account. The groups and pages you like will not be spared. You try to make yourself free from any suspicions. When you think of all this, it seems really difficult to clear all that. You tried your best for an hour and you are about to give up. You read a blog post someone wrote on travel precautions to take at such times of travel. His are really more serious than the ones you saw before. Finally, you call your brother living in town and exchange your phone for his for the week. With his phone you cannot access the Internet. Your brother warns you that you would find it hard to work without social media in the place you go to. You also know that messaging with friends for information and meeting up and checking updates on Facebook is really helpful. You convince yourself and tell him and that you would not like to be carrying your death warrant with you. Now, with this little phone from your brother, at least you avoid an unfriendly checking by the soldiers you meet on the way to the place or on your destination. You know that you don’t have any political involvement. You know that you are immune to all this, but who knows how law enforcement authorities think? A woman sitting next to you on the bus whispers to you that there would be a demonstration in your town on that same day. Something strikes your mind, “What if my brother is asked for his phone? What if police catch him?” Immediately you message him, “Please uninstall the Facebook Application from my phone. I forgot to tell you that.”
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ