“Lift up your head, open your eyes and you’ll realise that this media we call social is anything but, when our lives are mostly digital and our doors always shut”.

Tēnā rā koe Te Ariki, tātou Katoa e te Whānau.

Today I will be talking to you about how ICT, technology are holding youth back from a better future.
Did you know an average person will spend four years of his or her life looking down at a device? Pretty, ironic aye.
My Nan likes to say to me, “Boi kānohi ki te kānohi, face to face, you can’t hongi your phone, what a hard case.”

Over 2 million kiwis using social media, Facebook being more popular than Stuff and Wikipedia, it’s 13 years old with 1.6 billion users, and the fastest growing social platform, meaning 210,000,000,000,000 valuable hours wasted worldwide. 

Whānau, these devices we have they’re just an illusion,
A true sense of social exclusion,
A false sense of whakawhanaungatanga,
For the real world needs each one of us to sort the confusion.

Now I ain’t gonna stand here and go through every cliché known to man like, use your time wisely, don't grow up too fast or yolo you only live once. All I’m saying is ICT and social media are the worst distraction and the biggest time waster ever. 

So many of us youth performing in the pageantry of vanity,
Conforming to that accepted form of digital insanity.
The best thing about having a low battery,
Is that you’ll be one bar closer back to humanity.
So, put down that phone, shut down that display,
Take in your surroundings and make the most this day.

Kia ora!