Our Social Media Generation

         
      I do not know if it still applies to the present day secondary school system but back then after the Junior Common Entrance Examinations you were given an extra long vacation. Mine was in 2005 and I remember spending it reading. I read every single book in our personal library at home from my fathers big Medical books that had words in them like "thromboxanes" and "vasoconstrictors" to books by african authors like Ama Ata Aidoo, Mongo Beti, Florence Nwapa and others. I became a regular face at the Stella Obasanjo Library and my parents encouraged my voracious reading habit by buying me books on whatever new topic had caught my fancy from black slavery to my obsession with amassing encyclopedia's.

       I remember the year I read 173 books, I had been in a competition with my younger brother to see how many books we got to read that year sadly he won that contest. Well that was then, now I feed myself off the unintellectual content that is the make up of most of the blogs out there. A habit that is just as unhealthy as eating junk food, you know that it's consequence is damaging but you still indulge in it.

        Our generation in 2016 would rather watch"keeping up with the kardashians" as opposed to watching a documentary on the evolving trends in technology or the new discoveries in stem cell research. We read "linda Ikeji" as opposed to Peter. H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler's "Abundance".
         When we have the occasional guilt trip about not reading enough, we read books with obsqure titles like "How to become rich like Dangote overnight". We are a generation highly invested in consumerism, selfie obsessed and grossly superficial.We have become a generation whose parameters for success and excellence are all centered around  materialism.

         I wonder what values and legacies our generation will be giving to our posterity if we are a generation that do not know who Bennet Omalu and Olaudiah Equiano were or what they stood for and if we do not know that while we were chatting  on Facebook  a Nigerian had invented one of the first chip multi processors in the world with support for Thread Level Speculation(TLS).

         We are the generation that would rather use an emoticon, a meme or gif to pass an important message across or better yet we would rather abbreviate words when writing because it's more convenient. So that we may get on with the busy schedules in our lives, schedules like becoming an Instagram celebrity.