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What are the biggest concerns for our society today?

We live in a world where hunger, poverty, climate change, energy crisis, and terrorism are constantly in the news. In fact, so much it is being said about those issues, we could assume they are the biggest concerns for our society. However, that is not the case.

According to a story about the use of Google published last week by Clarin newspaper (Buenos Aires), most users go to that search site looking for information about intimate relations and different aspects of those relations.

It seems, according to the same source, that every day dozens of millions of searchers say they want serious answers about questions related to sex, questions that in the past were answered by parents, priests, teachers, of medical doctors.

After analyzing the wording of the questions and the kind of information requested, Clarin inferred most of those users go to Google searching for information about intimate relations are young people. The conclusion is that those young people are practically forced to go online to search for answers because they don’t longer talk with adults.

In other words, they are young people with the desire of having better human interaction in the real world, but they first search for answers in the virtual world, thus showing that in real life those users –regardless of their age– lack true solid interpersonal and intergenerational relationships, where they can talk face to face with another person.

Clarin quotes Italian psychiatrist Stefano Pallanti, who says that many people have “moved their brains” to Internet.

I have only anecdotes as evidence to corroborate Pallanti’s statement, but I agree with him. There have been recent occasions when I present a topic to an audience, and the first question after the presentation is, “What’s the address of the site where you read that?”

“It is what I wrote in my own site,” I sometimes reply, jokingly, adding that not everything I say or believe comes direct from Internet.

In my opinion, there are two important effects of moving your brain to Internet: the permanent and almost irresponsible immersion in the virtual world, and the growing distance between generations.

As an example of the first effect, a well-known social networking site was previously used to community information between “friends” about what people were doing in real life. Now the site is being used mostly to community what people are doing online (like “watering” a virtual farm.)

The second effect is seen in the growing trend, especially among parents over 45 and with teenagers, with hire private investigators to spy on their own children, because the parents want to know where their children go, what they “consume,” and what online sites they frequently visit.

I am concerned about hunger, poverty, terrorism, homelessness, human trafficking, discrimination, and other issues already mentioned. But those are all issues in the real world.

How are we ever going to resolve all those problems if the next generation spends most of its time online, in the virtual world? That’s my real concern.

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