Electronic overload

I like the internet a lot. For my wife and me, it is indispensable to have in the house; our livelihood depends on access to information and other people as provided by a fast connection in our home. My academic writings, my learning, my sharing of information with others, my project proposals, all of these would be impossible without the internet. Sometimes I sit back and wonder at how difficult something I do would have been without the internet. Had I had certain questions or certain ideas ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't have been able to pursue them, because I wouldn't have had the internet at my fingertips.

That said, I am aware of the dangers of the electronic life. The immediate-gratification, on-demand nature of the internet makes it addictive, and I like many other people am prone to spend hours on the internet, ever-busy, only to discover that I've done nothing of value in that time. I have begun to try to control this by things like not checking my email as frequently, taking a breath and realizing that nothing too new or important has probably happened since I last checked my favorite blogs, and most importantly, only logging on when I have a defined task to accomplish. This is a good thing. There are times when it's justified for my wife and me to turn on our computers first thing in the morning after waking up and greeting one another, but often it's pure compulsion, and a detraction from our family and love life.

But I realize that my case is much milder than that of many other people in Colombia and especially the US. I spend maybe a few hours online a day, and most of that is legitimate work-related pursuits (information searches, blogging, reading of articles, meetings, etc.). I am aware when I'm compulsively web-surfing, and I try to control it. I don't have a blackberry or any other device that keeps me permanently connected. And in fact, because I don't work in the mainstream professional world, there's not a constant stream of emails arriving in my mailbox. Most of my mail comes from all these progressive groups I have probably mistakenly associated myself with. Every day I dutifully sign petitions, call my Congressmen, etc.!

I think the lack of a high-tech cellphone is key for my wife and me. I have a beat-up fourth-hand Nokia that I bought on the street for like $15US. No color screen, no internet access, nothing. My wife has a slightly newer model (I don't impose my Spartan ethic on others!), but it too lacks internet connectivity. I think this is a real boon for our lives and our marriages, not to be ever-tempted by constant little beeps alerting us to text messages, facebook updates, etc. My wife uses her phone a lot, because she works managing teams in far-flung areas of Colombia, but she's not glued to a blackberry screen. I can't ever imagine myself subscribing to Twitter—that type of information is very demanding of attention while offering little benefit for my life.

My love of plants is another aspect of my life that provides me with a simpler, slower, more organic pursuit to counterbalance the frenetic, ultra-fast electronic world.

Something that I love about plants is that they are on a different, slower schedule than we humans. I tend a number of gardens belonging to our friends, which involves my planting seeds in a nursery here in my house, and then transplanting them out in the gardens when they're of a certain size. I have to keep them watered and exposed to lots of sunlight, but they really don't take very much care. If I don't water for a few days, the plants are fine. Even if I really screw up and don't water them for many days, there's a big window between their drying out and wilting some, and their actually dying. Plants can wilt for a day or two, and if you water them thereafter, they'll be happy and perky within the day. Likewise, when you plant seedlings outside, they look sort of scraggly for a day or two as they adjust to the new environment, but eventually they settle in and prosper.

Aside from their slower pace, I like that plants operate on their own schedule, not mine. A given plant can take a few weeks to germinate, with no ostensible change from day to day, but then from one day to the next there can be a huge change, with the plant peeking above the surface, spreading its first leaves, flowering, etc. In this way plants are sort of like the internet, which goes at its own inexorable pace regardless of whether you're online or not. But plants are intrinsically life-creating, never frivolous, while the internet is often empty and life-devouring.

Here is an article about replacing calendars and datebooks with electronic applications. I have not done so, and I don't foresee my doing so. I maintain various paper notebooks—a diary, an agenda, a notebook for my professional, scientific, artistic, and agrarian ideas, a notebook where I keep track of monthly expenditures. This latter seemed silly and compulsive initially to my wife, but now she is an enthusiastic contributor to our spending records. At the end of each month, I summarize our costs by category in the notebook, and then I pass this to an Excel spreadsheet. I feel this is a good marriage of diligent paper record-keeping with electronic categorization and manipulation for comparisons and future planning.

I think that my wife and I grew up in a good generation for responsibly living in the electronic age. Our childhood occurred in a transitional period between analog and digital media. We were raised on books and bad TV, with video games that started to interest us once we were somewhat into childhood, while never being so interesting that they could consume our lives. I feel that this has put us in a great position to take advantage of the digital age. We are avid readers of books, scientific articles, history, novels, newspapers, whatever we can get our hands on. We keep journals, maintain hand-written lists of things to do, write some drafts of things by hand. The internet merely expands the available offering of media sources. We are able to navigate the net, manage hyperlinks, sort out which information interests us and which doesn't. I wonder if this is the case with younger generations that will grow up with less exposure to books and more to the internet. Will the internet be an expansion of media options for them, or a replacement of analog media (movies, books, music, newspapers) with lots of superficial tidbits (tweets, facebook updates, short online articles)?

Maybe though the generation isn't as critical as the upbringing. My stepdaughter is 14, and has hence spent most of her life in the internet age. She has a few social networking pages, a blog, a cellphone. But in the house she's rarely online (this is due in part to her computer's being temporarily out of service from her loading up the hard drive with movies and music!). She isn't on facebook, she doesn't participate in or suffer from cyber-bullying, she likes to read books. I don't know if this is a tribute to her character, to her parents' raising of her, or to Colombia's being in a different moment with relation to the internet and other digital media.

The importance of upbringing (specifically access to printed, physical books) is underlined in this David Brooks article discussing the profound intellectual development in book-reading children as compared to a mental impoverishment among electronic addicts (and here is a more in-depth article about the ill effects computers have on poor kids' academic performance). I especially like Brooks's comparison of being a book-reader to belonging to a special club, in which one advances in knowledge and references as one reads more. This was something that escaped me as a kid, despite my being a voracious, diverse reader. I would hear people referring to well-known works, academic treatises, things like that, and think that that was an elite club to which I didn't belong, as opposed to the being the higher-level extension of the path I was embarking on. I think this had mostly to do with my own neuroses and feelings of always being left out. That said, once I started reading the great works that people always referred to, I felt great, like a real adult. This happened mainly in college and with technical books. I had always read quite a few important novels as a kid, and those I didn't read were because I thought them old-fashioned and boring!

Brooks makes reference to a book called "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, which seems to have inspired much of the recent thought and debate about the ill effects of the internet age on attention span and intellect. I haven't read it, but this quote from Carr seems to describe the gist of it: "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do" when he has to read something involved and in-depth like a novel. Carr's thesis is that heavy internet use, with its hyperlinks and immediate gratification, has diminished our ability to concentrate and do what Carr calls deep thought, deep reading. The above-linked review of the book describes email as “that constant influx of the social acknowledgment craved by our monkey brains”, and Carr claims that the internet's basic mechanics turn us into "lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment." The review ends with a disturbing question: “What will we lose socially, politically, civilly, scientifically, psychologically, if a majority decides that the intellectual 'shallows' are the proper habitat for the 21st-century mind?”

Maybe in the end the problems and challenges of the electronic age aren't so new. I once heard a quote, I think from Proust, to the effect that books are marvelous things if they enhance your life experience, but horrid things if they replace your life experience. My dealing with my dad's death was eased and aided by certain books I'd read, and now when I read “Love in the Time of Cholera” my experience informs my reading, and my reading gives me new insight on dealing with the death of a parent. But from the very beginnings of the novel as art form, Don Quijote reminds us that it's dangerous and delusional to replace real life with fantasy and reading.

I was initially inspired to write this blog by a NYT article on the negative mental effects of always being “plugged in”. An especially interesting insight of the article is that though many people think multitasking makes them more productive, it often does just the opposite, even after-hours when they're no longer working. The article links heavy electronic media usage to a loss of empathy and a deterioration of family life. The NYT also published simultaneous offerings about the increased forgetfulness and impatience of electronic addicts, and people's recognizing their problems with electronic media and seeking to address them. I for one can certainly relate to my behavior's changing due to the internet. Sometimes if I'm looking for a specific passage in a book, I think, “I should type in this phrase in the search function,” only to remember that books don't come with automatic search functions!

Here's a Maureen Dowd article on a more tangible ill effect of technology: radiation emitted by cellphones. And here's an article about tech-addicted parents who interact less with their kids. Here is a good article on breaking the email addiction. Here is a silly but dead-on video about people who lose normal human function due to their overdependence on electronic devices, and the resulting information overload.

As I was finishing the first draft of this blog at 11pm one night, I realized the irony of my being glued to the computer, working on an article decrying the electronic domination of our lives, while my wife slept in our bed, where I should have been at that hour. However, in the subsequent days I have been much more conscious and responsible about my internet use, only turning on my computer for defined work tasks, and this only in our study, never in the bed or in the living room. The mere fact of taking a step back to reflect and write about the issue has made me more self-aware and forced me to ask myself some profound questions and to set some priorities. I think this type of measured reflection is precisely what is needed if we are to use the internet responsibly and to our true benefit.