That best describes our past month largely unplugged.We have a few more days until our regular internet connection is established. Meanwhile we have been using a mobile broadband stick which has allowed us a few minutes each to check mail, look up train/plane schedules, google maps, and to check in with our son in Korea. It has been a mixed blessing.
My Flickr and photography networks are sorely missed. Sorely missed. I have used up a few of my minutes downloading more tutorials to work through offline which greatly inspires and stretches my imagination, hones some skills. On the flipside there were also some deeply embittered bloggers, right where we left them weeks ago, having found new subjects to attack, fixate, and expound upon. I don't miss that. As Jane Eyre says,
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
Much too short.
Coincidentally, during this low-tech period, I came across a recent issue of Newsweek. (link to article) The cover sports a distressed individual with the word "iCrazy" overhead. Having some Luddite tendencies myself, it caught my eye. What I learned though is that while the ill effects of social media have been hypothesized since the get-go, there is now solid clinical evidence that our smart phone world is not making us smarter. In fact, it is shrinking our brains. As in, mri's of heavy internet users mirror those of drug addicts with "fundamentally altered frontal cortex's" "abnormal white matter" and a shrinkage of up to 20% of gray matter. In lay terms – that is the part of your brain that controls memory, senses, speech and emotion.
Emotions, it seems, don't fare well at all with regular internet use. Particularly vulnerable are those who are prone to depression and anxiety. Doctors now find there is a "direct link" between internet use and depression. It is not just technology users who suffer. Do you surf while you nurse your baby? Psychologist Sherry Turkle warns that "a mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. " That tension is interpreted by the child as coming from the mother- child relationship. Think about that, new moms. A lot.
This is not strictly just an emotional appeal however. In Tel Aviv they are they have published the first cases of internet related psychosis. They believe internet communication to be capable of causing true psychotic phenomenon. In Asia they have resorted to treating teens with gaming addictions through electric shock therapy. A Stanford doctor found that executives with heavy internet usage failed the official test for multiple personality disorders. This may be more common than you imagine.
"We could create the the most wonderful world for our kids, but it's not going to happen if we're in denial," warns a pharmocology professor from Oxford. It's not going to happen.
I am making this article and the book mentioned, iDisorder, required reading for my teens. I am reading and considering myself. I love beauty. I love being able to step into a virtual art gallery in a few free moments and be refreshed, to walk away with new ideas for photography techniques or compositions, to download notes for the current novel we are reading. But this is serious stuff and I think that surfing may needs be limited to a couple days per week where I can load up my blog and download tutorials.
We need to model for our kids. We are responsible for forming those little brains and it pains me to think we, collectively, are sending a host of children into the world with 'altered' brains, or attempting this great vocation of parenting them with less than full working capacity in our own. So instead of attempting some days off the computer periodically, perhaps scheduling a few days on is wiser.
It is a tool. We probably need it for everything from reserving tickets to paying bills to receiving children's homework assignments, just as we need vehicles and so on. But, since this particular tool has far more addictive qualities than others, just as we don't need to be strapped into our cars all day and night or shackled to our microwaves we do not need to be at the beck and call of our Facebook account or our Twitter feed.
* Much of this information was asserted in Simplicity Parenting years ago where they urge anyone experiencing anxiety or depression in their children or themselves to take concrete steps to simplify, to unplug (tv, cpu, news), to quiet their world. It is a highly recommended read.
Starry Sky Journal 