No, no me he puesto romántico de pronto. Este es un post que tenía pendiente, como muchos otros, acerca de mi visión de lo que pasó en el Global Voices Summit 2010 en Santiago de Chile, así que ahí les va.

Kenyan Poet es una colaboradora de Global Voices y, obviamente, una poeta y blogger de Kenia. Ella estuvo presente en Santiago y al final de las sesiones públicas nos ofreció este poema suyo (el agradecimiento a Jakub Górnicki por grabarlo y subirlo a YouTube):

Fue una participación diferente y que nos tuvo a todos en un silencio cómplice hasta el final, en parte por la reflexión a la que nos invita el texto y que como imaginarán, en todos "agarraba carne", pero también por la fuerza de su declamación. Para aquellos a quienes se les haga un poco difícil entender la pronunciación de la poeta pues acá les tengo el texto en inglés tal como fue publicado en su blog:

Digital Hearts

There was a time when a mouth, eyes, ears, a touch
Were the essentials in a conversation
Humans were more in touch with one another and with nature
Watching, listening and touching

A sight of migrating birds meant an approaching storm,
change in seasons or looming danger.
The tree’s whispers of cool sounds soothed our minds into peace
The crackling fall of a branch and singing of birds’ music,
Made love to our souls deepening our bond with what is real.

Now instead of facing each other, we face book
Our voices have become keys that we punch on keyboards,
Our smiles and emotions have become smileys and icons,
Our hearts no longer constantly antagonize our lips to say “I love you”
For we simply short text our messages from our hearts and minds
long enuf 2 min wat we r sayin but shot enuf not 2 excd 160 charctrs
we no longer pour our hearts out in persuasive soothing flow of words and smitten voices
Our fingers have subjected the feelings that the lips, eyes and face could never fill in a book
To cold machines making us similar to robots with the only difference being
We sit behind actual robots.

We are baring our lives, captured moments and souls to the digital world
Strangers whom we would never invite in to our homes
Now see the bottom of our beds the insides of our loos and beneath our garments
To fantasize, masturbate and stalk our digitized selves

Like the spider web that entangles a fly to its demise,
We have gotten ourselves caught up in the world web.
Yet in this connected world of digital bits and bytes,
We lost our heart bits and bought into gadgets to substitute our five senses

I ask you,
Are we connecting with each other or with technology?
Because we lost our human touch somewhere in the zeros and ones of this digital age.