Cloud

Cyber-modern youth are changing how things are done in such areas as teaching, art, communication, business and relationships. What do we need to do to adapt to their expectations and their vision of the world? How can we impart our values to them? How can we inspire them? How can we learn from them?

The overlap between the real and virtual worlds is a defining characteristic of our contemporary society – and dictates the way we understand, enjoy and shape it. Caught in a vortex of virtual messaging, we live, grow and interact in an ethereal environment. We spend all our time in a hazy cyberworld, neither here nor there, where the tangible and the abstract meet, as if we were living in a landscape and in a painting of that landscape at the same time.

“Are our bodies better off here or there?” is a fair question given our dual existence. We transform our daily lives into an intangible – yet illustrated – saga. We extract our existence from the real world so that we can share it more easily. Our virtual preoccupations, our virtual friends and our virtual values leave us precious little time for what is real. One look at our posture is enough: we sit hunched over, obsessed with our screens. The virtual world prevents us from fully experiencing the real world, and vice versa. When we lift our heads, a breath of reality relieves our virtual suffocation. This restores us to our rightful place, in the present, in the here and now. It reminds us that we are still alive, that we aren’t ghosts, user profiles or data points.