Stories of the open road

By Pathum Punchihewa

Human relationships in Digitalized Z generation…

“Lonely architect Miles purchases a fancy new "Pine cone" personal computer and clumsily spills champagne on it which, of course, imbues the computer with human or more than human- intelligence; with prodigious musical talents.”

“Now the computer that calls himself Edgar, proceeds to fall in love with Miles' upstairs neighbor, beautiful cellist Madeline with whom it engages in scintillating musical duets. Madeline of course assumes the music comes from the obviously shy Miles and a romance ensues. And this romance tokes the fires of jealousy within Edgar. By way of revenge, Edgar cancels Miles' credit cards and starts a chain of havoc on his on-line accessible identity. Meanwhile Madeline cannot understand why Miles won't play music with her when he obviously has such talent. None the less, human love prevails and Edgar sadly commits suicide when he realizes that he will never, can never, win the heart of Madeline his human affection.

Am I explaining a 80s decade sci-fi story that looks obsolete with today’s "Internet era" or am I telling you just an Old version of todays’ Z generation?

If somebody wants to understand about Z generation, he must be at least be born after the 80’s because adults who have roots in 70s or before can never understand the desires and passions of Z generation or Y generation and specially they will never be able to understand the inner connection between them and  cyber space.

Instead of ‘Edgar the computer who fell in love with a human girl’ as we read in the above synopsis, today we can see ‘many Zee gens who fall in love with cyber space’. Don’t believe me? Then take a good look around. People surf through friends profiles of facebook, people freeze in online chat rooms, and people even romance through SMS. Where are human relationships?

When you pick a good looking girl through her Facebook profile, and fall in love with her as she is very sweet and adorable on her chatting sessions, don’t you think that you really fall in love with a part of cyberspace? Boy, you never can understand somebody simply through cyberspace!

As adults can hardly understand our, Z gens’ or Y gens’ desires and penchants, today it’s up to ourselves to understand ourselves and patch up our lives and add missed ingredients.

Do you ever think that we merely became young adults so soon? I believe everybody should go through the grind of the mill of the intrinsic stages of life. Otherwise we will have to seek our missing childhood or missing teen hood for the rest of our life..

If we put facts together simply, we spend too much time on Internet, in front of computers and holding our mobile phones. Simply we are too integrated with machines and the digital world. And some of our human elements  simply vanish due to the lack of communication with the human world.

Now this is something that belongs to Love guru’s column, but do you honestly believe that you can romance with a girl just through SMS? I seriously doubt it.

As somebody heavily intergrated with cyber world, I can talk about the wrong turns I took. And I can give solutions as well. How about the old fashioned ‘get togethers’ or ‘hanging around’ with school friends…? Why don’t you try classic type romantic tips without involving technology?  Books or theater…? Maybe all of them and more...

Remember, being a Zee or Y gen geek who sits around whole day and night in front of a laptop hooked to internet in a dark and lonely life is not ‘cool’, it sucks, believe me. Children and youth today need to be ‘real cool without needing a machine or a drop of technology and not be machines but humans.

Published on Youth Mirror - Daily Mirror (30th September 2010)