I’m
annoyed at how often I check my iPhone, not because I’m constantly disrupted by
the loud ping of a text received or the vibration of an email sneaking into my
in-box – though both happen frequently – but because I’m addicted to checking
it for signs I matter.
I look online at the news to find something interesting, even outrageous. I scan my emails, darting across a thick congestion of spam, and then, if I didn’t receive a text I spit one out and sens it to a few people, hoping to elicit a response, anywhere from a chuckle to praise to outrage, depending on what I shared.
Why do I need to be in touch, connected, and so involved in the world in my digital box? What validation am I seeking,? What need goes unfulfilled, where I feel drawn to spending many parts of the day with my mind lost in the various short narratives and witty exchanges that come into my narrow line of vision?
I look online at the news to find something interesting, even outrageous. I scan my emails, darting across a thick congestion of spam, and then, if I didn’t receive a text I spit one out and sens it to a few people, hoping to elicit a response, anywhere from a chuckle to praise to outrage, depending on what I shared.
Why do I need to be in touch, connected, and so involved in the world in my digital box? What validation am I seeking,? What need goes unfulfilled, where I feel drawn to spending many parts of the day with my mind lost in the various short narratives and witty exchanges that come into my narrow line of vision?
Like
some gigolo or slut who has more one-night sexual encounters that one can
remember, but who feels a sense of emptiness, maybe guilt or loss, when
reflecting on his deeds, I too feel at the end of the day that I may have
wasted my time and squandered an opportunity to do something better, bigger, or
more rewarding.
And
yet I’ll go back at it the next day, and the next, and the next, doubling down
on the all too familiar habit of connecting to the world through my phone. It’s no different than any other crippling
addiction – is it?
So
what’s the solution?
How do we gaze our eyes off of the glowing, ever-changing computer in our pockets and look up to see the real world around us? How can we stop reading trivial nonsense online and instead wrap our minds around a good book? How do we move from viewing a lot of amateurish content and investing in the words of proven writers who research things, fact-check, and conduct interviews?
How do we gaze our eyes off of the glowing, ever-changing computer in our pockets and look up to see the real world around us? How can we stop reading trivial nonsense online and instead wrap our minds around a good book? How do we move from viewing a lot of amateurish content and investing in the words of proven writers who research things, fact-check, and conduct interviews?
Don’t
get me wrong. The Internet offers far
more good than bad, just as having television, newspapers, and radio make us a
better society than without any of them.
But I fear that we’re in a Wild West period with the content that gets
consumed today. Too much is unfiltered, unedited, not factual, not well-written.
But we gobble all of it up, mixing everything into a soup of distracted
thoughts.
We go from a cat video to a blog penned by a nut in his basement to a New York Times article, to a You Tube health video to the tweets of Trump in a sweeping matter of minutes. Can we properly process what is being fed to us? Do we really understand the various truths being thrust upon us?
We go from a cat video to a blog penned by a nut in his basement to a New York Times article, to a You Tube health video to the tweets of Trump in a sweeping matter of minutes. Can we properly process what is being fed to us? Do we really understand the various truths being thrust upon us?
We’re
on a steady informational junk food diet.
We’re addicted to searching, clicking, viewing, listening, and reading
content from all types of sources on a wide variety of subject matter. These bits and bytes are molding our brain
like digital opioids.
All
of this online data consumption comes at the expense of doing other things
including the act of book reading. If
you spend hours daily or Facebook, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, email, news
sites, and other miscellaneous sources, you can’t be reading books. One would argue that reading a good book
shall inspire, inform, and enlighten us far more than watching cat porn,
reading celebrity gossip, or following the Twitter feed of an overpaid athlete.
One
thing our handy phones provide that a book doesn’t is variety. You can view anything – on the spot – at any
time with your phone. A book is but one
thing. Another advantage offered by our
phones is that we can derive a quick pleasure from a two-or three-minute video
viewing or blog reading. A book’s payoff
takes hours or longer stretches of concentration a lot more than the time it takes to read
one’s Facebook comments.
Another
big advantage a phone has is that it is interactive. Read an article and forward it to a friend –
or write the person who posted it. A
book has no such interaction.
Let’s face it, no one is choosing a book over their phone, not completely anyway. We must learn to balance the two. Books demand – and warrant – more of our time – but the phone keeps calling for our attention. We must find a happy medium or we’ll lose ourselves inside the matrix without a clear way out.
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