The Movie Review: Offline Is the New Luxury

The movie review: Offline is the new luxury

Synopsis

A new documentary film, “Offline is the new luxury” was produced by VPRO. The film is about how expansion of the digital networks and new technologies that is connected to the internet are related to our life.

The film opens from the description of an incredible new scanner app which is named “White Spots”.  It makes the invisible digital networks visible and shows the cellphone towers that communicate 24/7 with our smartphones. On the new white spots world map the areas with the mobile phone and internet coverage are black. The white spots are the areas where there’s no signal yet. The enormous density of cell phone towers looks terrifying.

Companies and governments want the whole wide world to be connected wireless so they are experimenting with drones and satellites to achieve total connectivity. The director of the film is wondering what exactly will happen if this master plan becomes reality. It’s happening in the here and now. The film moved on with an example of Sri Lanka. This country was chosen by tech-giant Google to be the first one with the hundred per cent coverage of free Wi-Fi.  The internet critic, Evgeny Morozov, tried to explain the Google actions. The idea is that everything moves in one direction: the economy, the decision makers, the international relations, domain of security to reach full internet coverage and build the infrastructure. It is being sold to us with arguments of progress but the invisible drawback is that you give up your freedom. The data is an asset for companies like Google.

The lack of privacy protection is one of the consequences of increasing wireless communication highlighted in this film. It is interesting but there are no laws or regulations about the privacy. The next horrifying effect is related to our daily life. Everyone expected that internet will enchase our experience but reality shows something different. The psychologist, Sherry Turkle, enthusiastically described how computers were being part of our personal lives. Actually, it was taking students away from the conversation with teachers. An open laptop in classroom distracted not just the person with this laptop but all students around it. People became more and more dependent on their phones, laptops and other devices.

This is a story of our present life where the most part of our time we spent on the internet rather than talking with friends.

Opinion

This is about us. All of us. We are online everywhere all the time. Technology was creeping further and further into our lives. In the last twenty years the world has changed dramatically. It is scary and beautiful at the same time. We have access to the internet and wireless communication where ever we are and whenever we want. Unfortunately, it is overwhelming us. But this is only one side of the coin. On the other hand everything in our life depends on our own choice. In the film we saw lovely woman who has a successful business without internet connection. She only has a cellphone outside her house that helps her to connect with the clients. This is a real-life example that it is possible to run a company without any internet of computer access.