Fourteen years ago today, I wrote a blog post asking, "How much connection do you need?" Context is important here... the iPhone was barely a year and a half old, Blackberry and Palm were still a thing, and Android was just starting to make a splash while the old Windows Mobile was in its last run. Or more to the point, ten times as many "smart phones" are sold now compared to then. But with social media starting to gain traction via desktop computers and connectivity becoming more ubiquitous, there were definitely people looking down at devices constantly, and it was weird to see.
How quaint, right? Look in any direction in public and see people mostly glued to their phones. Young people don't know a time before this. That blog post, and the comments on it, make some really interesting points though. My friend Mike, one of my podcast buddies at the time (yeah, in 2008, get off my lawn!), I think made the great observation that we are culturally consumption addicts. It was more about acquiring things then, but we've filled much of that need now with information.
Carrie made the point in a comment that a steady diet of information is not itself harmful, that it really depends on what you do with it. I agree with this, because the same arguments have been made about rock music, video games, and if you go back far enough, books. The danger we observe today has more to do with how people apply (or ignore) critical thinking with regard to what they consume. It seems bigger now because of the aforementioned ubiquity.
I admit that I'm judgy about this topic. Part of it is because of the general bad behavior of people, like the people who talk on their phones while trying to conduct a transaction with a cashier, for example. And this too is about the person, not the technology. But it's also because of where I am in life. I find myself getting less out of what's on my phone, and I know that for however much time I have left, memories are not made there. I'm no longer doom scrolling, but I find myself sometimes sitting on a Wordle clone for a half-hour and ask where the time went. I enjoy it, sure, but it feels like I could be doing something better.
There are boundaries that I'm happy to say I adhere to. I've never turned on notifications for any social media. I don't get work email on my phone. I can, but it's not automatic. Slack is there, but turned off in non-work hours. People often talk about flexible work, when they really mean work without limits that a conventional day would otherwise require. People can't accept that the email you get at 5 on Friday can be answered Monday. There might be exceptional circumstances, but anything else is a cultural problem.
There are other problematic scenarios. I saw a plea from a musician that complained that all of their time was spent on self-promotion online, leaving little time to actually create art. Consultants seem to agree that it's the only way that they can grow their business. And then there are other people who talk about their "brand," and maintaining that, despite having no particular skills or abilities (i.e., "influencers"). I can't be the only one who thinks that's broken. The tool is using you, wagging the dog, in the parlance of our time.
I probably sound like I'm making an "I played in the dirt" argument, but I'm a technologist and gadget freak, so I don't think it's that. It's telling that so many of the people that I used to enjoy interacting with from around the country via the Internets are no longer there. They're over it. Maybe I'm heading that way. And that's weird to say, because those connections were/are real, just far less frequent.
No comments yet.