The New York Times Bits blog invites a number of readers to “unthether” themselves from technology for a period of time and to create a video of their experience. Reactions to this mini-exercise ran the gamut:
For Jenn Monroe, 40, giving up the Internet and phone led to a desire to purge other technologies from her life.
“I didn’t want to open my computer at all, even though that wasn’t part of the deal,” she said. “I avoided the microwave, which was also sort of strange and surprising to me.”
But for many, finding the right balance can be hard. James Cornell, 18, spent his day away from his cellphone feeling jittery, and he worried that he was annoying people by not responding to them. John Stark, 46, told his friends that he wouldn’t be responding to text messages, expecting them to call him on the phone if they needed to communicate. They sent text messages to his wife instead, asking her to relay information to him.
I know I have to make it a point to turn the computer off when I’m with my six year old. The instant gratification of a tweet or an e-mail is hard to resist. But then again, so is television, food, a good novel, smoking, etc. The need to distract ourselves from our daily lives does not begin and end with the Internet. The distraction might be more visceral on-line, but couldn’t we say the same thing about radio, print, phonographs, etc. I worry about this “Google is making us stupid” meme, popularized by Nick Carr’s Atlantic article, is producing a whole set of articles and books that don’t really advance our understanding of the effect of technology on our lives. Imagine an article called “is alcohol making me drunk”? or “is food making me fat”? You couldn’t. It’s more complicated than that. The point isn’t that the medium has no effect on humans, it’s that those effects are nuanced and contextual.
Comments 3
Jonathan Pfeiffer — September 1, 2010
You are correct to compare the nuance and contextuality of food to the nuance and contextuality of the internet. But methodologically they are very different because they played starkly different roles in human evolution. When it really comes down to how to understand the effect of anything on human beings, I think there is an important distinction between things that accompanied us in evolution, and things that did not. There must be a big difference between the way food affects us and the way the internet affects us, because food -- unlike the internet -- is essential to human life in a way that has the deepest ramifications for how we became the way we are. One cannot understand healthy eating in the same way one can understand healthy use of gadgets. For eating, we have millions of years of reference; for gadget use, we have hardly any reference at all. That said, things like alcohol and cigarettes make the dichotomy a little bit blurry, because it is less clear whether those things were involved in our evolutionary history or not. (Fermented grapes might still be considered a new thing in Darwin years.) What do you think? Am I riding biology too hard?
Jonathan Pfeiffer — September 1, 2010
The only reason I brought this up is because I agree with you that we need a better understanding of the way technology affects us. To do that we need to figure out how to think about it, starting by identifying which ways of thinking are appropriate and which are not.
Sincerely,
Mr. Obvious
jose — September 2, 2010
Hi Jonathan....great "food for thought"..pardon the pun! I dunno, even food has different effects on individuals and only part of that has to do with biology. I agree we don't have a good framing for what this technology is equivalent too. I suspect it is much more dramatic and ubiquitous than the printing press...(e.g. there are 600 million facebook groups)! It's a good thing for me that we don't know. I have something to do in my old age :-)