Disconnecting Connection by Begemotfoto

"According to various studies, some kids spend an average of 7.5 hours in front of screens each day. That’s right –7.5 hours. That’s about as much time most adults spend at work each day. Teens now spend up to nine hours a day on social platforms alone. Astonishingly, the average person will spend nearly two hours (approximately 116 minutes) on social media everyday, which translates toa total of 5 years and 4 months spent over a lifetime. Currently, total time spent on social media beats time spent eating and drinking, socializing, and grooming. The realization of how much the average person actually spends on social media comes into sharper focus when comparing the figure (five years and four months) to the one year and three months we will spend over a lifetime socializing with friends and family in real life.

We are disappearing, cease to exist, perish. We can’t imagine our lives without the blue screens. We are bombarded with news, updates and statuses. We’ve got thousands of friends and yet we are alone. We are semi-transparent, lost in the blue light of useless information and a fake feeling of belonging.

The main goal of this project is to illustrate how we keep disconnecting from the reality around us at any given moment and becoming engaged in something that is perhaps real but not that important and relevant right now; How we just by the nature of habit choose more often to look at the screen instead of looking around, to text someone instead of talking to a person sitting in front of us; How our mind becomes global in the sense that we can engage in a conversation with people we barely know and at the same time ignore someone very close and real."

https://www.begemotfoto.com/

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Powerful images… makes me sad for the little kids especially.

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There’s a family in our neighborhood that the neighbors always complain the kids are always outside screaming. Um yeah, that’s what kids are supposed to do. They are “having fun.”

And OMG, the parents actually let them ride their bikes down the [dead end] street to the playground at the beach all by themselves! Um yeah, they aren’t helicopters. It gives me hope, sometimes. Unfortunately for every family like that there are hundreds just like those photos. Very sad.

I’m going out for dinner tonight. I wonder how many people there will be on their phones rather than enjoying a nice night out.

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Too many :frowning:

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These are nice. I agree with RKK, they leave me feeling sad.

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In an effort to counter this phenomenon, I have set a personal policy to never be one of 2 or more people who are looking at device screens in a setting where more than 2 people are present.

So say, if my wife and I are engaged in online research, shopping, etc., we may both be looking at screens (it happens often enough; it’s rarely, if ever, a ‘social media’ thing—we are grownups after all), but if a 3rd person enters the room, my device comes down.

In other words, if there are 3 or more people in the room, I’ll not look at a screen unless I’m the only one doing so, and it’s for a pertinent reason. It seems weird, but it has helped avert scenes like those posted here from taking hold in my day-to-day life.

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