I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the internet has made everyone connected all the time, and why we may want to think about reversing that trend.
Thanks to computers in every home, smartphones in our pockets, smart-home appliances, and networked cars, the average middle-class Westerner spends their life at the center of a digital spiderweb of connectivity. But it seems clear that all this information hasn’t improved our lives – just the opposite. It’s fed toxic rivers of misinformation, bolstered an unsustainable always-on work culture, and made us isolated, anxious and depressed.
If ubiquitous connectivity is the problem, disconnection could be the solution. If we deliberately went offline more often, would it make our lives better?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
This is more stimulation than our brains evolved to cope with.
For most of our species’ history, communities were small and local, and life moved at the slower pace of nature. Now news is deluging us faster than ever, as if everyone needed to know everything happening all over the world in real time. It’s no wonder so many of us feel stressed and overwhelmed. We don’t have the bandwidth!
There is a persistent misconception that more information naturally and automatically leads to truth and progress. Ignorance results from not enough information, goes the thinking. Increase the information and you increase understanding of the truth. This misconception is most prevalent among those with advanced education — those whose exposure to more information led (in their view) to more truth.
But this assumption of the automatic benefit of more information is demonstrably false.
To align with what you said, as the weather improves, I’ve joined a local hiking group. One of the topics the group covered last weekend before we set off on a trail was the value in disconnecting from technology. We happened to be on a trail that ran in a loop around a lake, so it was impossible to get lost. However, this group in general emphasizes learning to read a map–which engages several parts of the brain in active thinking–rather than relying on phone directions. Most humans have the innate ability to navigate, but fewer and fewer people are developing it because they’re over-reliant on phone-based GPS.
Also, in my household, we’ve vowed to completely disconnect from the internet one day a week (a weekend day). The news is just infuriatingly awful and most of it is nothing we personally can do about it, so there’s no consequences in skipping a day to find out what horrible thing this misadministration is up to. We’ve told people to call our existing landline (it’s part of a bundle and so we never got rid of it) and leave a message if they need to speak to us.
You would be surprised at the pushback we’re getting from people who feel they are entitled to our time right when it’s most convenient for them. If you grew up in the 1990s, you may remember a time before answering machines. If someone called and you weren’t there, they’d just try again later. The world didn’t end because someone couldn’t tell you the plot of some movie they streamed or what they had for lunch.
Katydid: Yes, I am surprised at that pushback. If I tell someone I won’t be near my phone on a particular day, so leave a message if you call, I’ve never heard any sort of objection, unless there’s a very specific case where someone NEEDS to talk to me on that day.
Seriously, what you’re describing is just plain rude, and most everyone knows our current telecom technology literally takes away most excuses for it.
Sorry to miss the point of the OP; but to continue with Katydid’s point:
“Email. Send me email. I like email. I hate phones. I kill phones.”—Laura Lemay
If I send you an e-mail message, you can deal with it at your convenience; but if I call you on the telephone, I expect you to drop whatever you’re doing to handle my immediate needs. The former is much more polite, the latter more self-important.
I would add that the written word is more reliable than the spoken word.
As far as disconnecting is concerned, I’d guess that has a lot to do with how connected one is to begin with. I’ve never used any kind of “social media” except for e-mail and blogs, so it’s less important for me.
I would add that the written word is more reliable than the spoken word.
That (IMO) depends on the situation. Sometimes feelings are more reliably conveyed by voice (by phone or face-to-face) than by writing. I’ve found that emails saying “please do X” can sound far less pleasant or polite than the same words spoken by a person’s voice. Even an officious boss can sound less officious by voice than by emails. Or maybe that’s just me…
I also dislike the telephone — it seems like rude interruption to me, and I have to make a response right away.
I also like e-mail and text chat — I don’t have to respond right away, and I can compose a message at my leisure. This includes doing research, something that I do a lot of.
Our host’s post on technology seems to underestimate the enormous value of the Internet in doing research. One can get access to a large amount of documents without going to major libraries, and get that access *very* quickly. In my earlier years, I spent a lot of time in libraries, but more recently, the Internet is a very good alternative. In fact, the Internet is good enough for me to give away most of my dead-tree books, because they are bulky and heavy in comparison with a similar amount of computer storage, like a thumb drive.
Like Bill, I would rather receive an email, and when I have to task people at work, I’d rather do it over email. You can word an email politely! Also, then you have a paper trail: If I send an email to X saying, “The big boss needs *this thing only you do*, ASAP, will you get it to them by COB? Thanks!”, then I know who to go after if it doesn’t get done. Or if I email my adult kids, “You’re birthday’s coming up–any requests?”, that gives them time to think and respond with no pressure.
OTOH, both personally and professionally, I have too many people just wasting my time with stupid stuff *because they can*. My office still uses Skype, which allows people to interrupt you all day long with their crises due to their own lack of planning. You can set a Do Not Disturb, so they come over to you with their unthoughtful request. I’ve had people barge in on meetings with stuff that absolutely, positively can wait, but they’ve been trained by cellphones and Instant Messenger to just wing everything. And to go back to my previous example, why should I have to interrupt whatever I was doing just because someone wants to describe to me every moment of the movie they just streamed? You want to talk to me, I’d be delighted to set a time and place to meet and hang out.
In the past couple of years, I lost both my parents to old age and a long list of health issues, so I’d work all day, arrive at their house and deal with the overburdened and underpaid care team and whatever chaos was going on…and invariably have to mute my phone because I’d be (for example) trying to feed a combative adult and dealing with the mental strain of that while having to mute my phone because someone else is bored and demands my attention and entertainment.
I have a dog, and I have dog-walking friends. We meet up at a particular time and place and hang out together while on a trail (or wherever we end up going). Doesn’t need electronic connection.
P.S. Another thing I hate is people calling me completely out of the blue saying, “I’ve got a 5-hour drive; talk to me to keep me occupied.” No, I will not be distracting a driver, and no, I do not have 5 hours to mindlessly chat with anyone. But the expectation is that other people are bored, so therefore it’s owed to them to be entertained. That’s what books-on-tape or the radio is for.
@lpetrich: the biggest reason for the internet (besides its military applications) was for academic research sharing. Early 1990s HTML (v1?) contained code that the early browser (e.g. the famous Mozilla) would render as frames, making it easy to post a static table of contents on the left and the documentation on the right.
Obviously the internet grew beyond its roots and now we’re running into huge problems with security. Just yesterday, I had to contact my phone provider. The website threw up an alert-and-abort from my malware detector. So I went to the fridge where I have a magnet from the company from 20 years ago, and called the number to conduct my business. But how many times have you browsed to a site that was compromised via hacking? Everyone has. What about all the ransomware attacks on hospitals and other huge institutions that are always on the news?
And as our infrastructure collapses and we get more extreme weather from climate change, it’s good to have a backup. The last time a hurricane knocked out our power for a couple of days, I had some paperback books to entertain myself. And for many years, back when I was driving around (now-adult) kids, I always had a paperback stashed in my car. Nobody’s going to break into a car to steal a paperback book, if you leave a book in a car in the hot sun or freezing cold, the book survives, and if you lose it, you’re only out a few dollars and nobody can get your personal information from it unless you’re stupidly jotting your SSN and banking information in it.