After listening to the first 15 second commercial before the above video gets started, there is an artist or poet, who apparently disdains the technological social network we have created. Ok, he is getting attention, he has an interesting concept song, but I can’t help but say after he is done:

Bullshit!

First, he uses YouTube to popularize his message, a device he supposedly disdains. Without the technology he puts in question I would never have heard his song.

Yes, I think it is rude to sit in a restaurant with a date and pick up your smartphone and start responding to emails. Yes, I think it’s terribly dangerous to text while driving. Yes, kids may spend too much in front of screens and not enough time in the woods finding treasures.

But the benefits of the technological advances we have today far outweigh those detriments in value. We now have contact with people we lost years, sometimes decades ago, and who would have been lost to us forever were it not for technology. We have communities we can use to share with others, like thoughts, pictures, notes and concepts, that we didn’t have only ten years ago.

We can now start companies in our spare bedrooms and make a living from our homes like never before. We have more safety, more security, more freedom, more information, and ultimately more time, because we’re not spending so much time on logistics and on running around on errands.

For every poignant point the poet in this video makes, I could make two counterpoints to the opposite effect.

As I see it: humanity in general is much richer and much healthier due to the connectivity technology provides. Now the question is: How does each one of us control that technology, that power, that connectivity, so it really enriches us and minimizes the slavery.