Ladies and gentlemen, your honored judges

     When you're leaving the hotel will you look into a mirror and adjust your clothes in front of it. But if it were a black mirror what could we get? With technology developing at a rocket speed, the black mirror is everywhere, on the screens of our cellphones, our computers and our televisions. In our daily life, we are always facing black mirrors. However, we can hardly see ourselves in it. Perhaps sometimes we can, but only as a colourless face. Technology has brought great convenience of communication for information but at the same time, it has webbed our thought.

     Several years ago, an article named “Is Google making us stupid” got quite popular on the Internet. At that time, I thought it was just alarmism but now I find it much worse because technology is not just making us stupid but also weakening our independent thought. About half year ago, I was invited to judge a debate competition. When I arrived at the competition room, I noticed it was an old and classic topic, so I was expecting those players to give me some new and special ideas. Unfortunately, when the game continued, I found all the viewpoints and examples they used were totally the same as the previous competition. The only fun during the competition was to predict what they would say. As far as I was concerned, they were not making a debate but replaying a video. Obviously, they just spoke for the black mirror.

     Debate was born as an area that we use our own thought to defend our opinion. However due to high technology, all these "My opinion is" in the competition are actually "The opinion I have found is". That is , really, a tragedy because all human dignity lies in thought which has been weakened by convenient technology.

     Truth to be told, debate is not the only example. In every field, we can get whatever information or opinions we want from the almighty black mirror. As a consequence, how to restructure human thought has become not only important but also necessary in today's technologically advanced world. And the answer is humanism which stands for human independent special mind. Just as humanism freed people's thought from the force of religion in the Renaissance, I'm waiting in the hope that it can rescue the ideology trapped in high technology. Humanism is a Lodestar guiding us to the era that anyone can form their own opinion about anything but not just speak the words from the Internet.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not an anti-technologist but I do care about those disadvantages that technology brings to our present life. With the laundry machine, we don't know how to hand wash clothes clean. With electronic address books, we can even hardly remember our girlfriends or boyfriends' phone numbers. And now with a convenient way to get opinion, we seldom think with our own mind. If so, human is only a reed, the feeblest thing in nature. So follow the spirit of humanism, have an independent mind, so that we can be colorful in those black mirrors.