The Big Disgusting Thing
I try not to be a hard ass. I do. And I’m pretty good about reigning it in when it comes to people doing stupid stuff. For example, if someone came to me and said, “I’m going to put my finger in an electric pencil sharpener,” I would call that person a “big, steaming pile of stupid,” though such a moniker is clearly well deserved. Instead, I’d say something along the lines of, “Well, why are you going to do that?” in the hopes of coming to a peaceful endgame that doesn’t involve the complete destruction of a perfectly good office appliance.
But I’ve gotta say it. You people are trying my patience.
Okay, that’s not fair. You’re not really trying my patience, average Joe Reader. I suppose if you’re reading this, it’s not really you I’m mad at, anyway. I’m mad – mad, mind you – at the number of people who are honestly and whole-heartedly without a clue when it comes to technology and what it will do for us. And I’ll tell you why.
But before I do, let me stop a minute to clarify something. People say they’re mad all the time. They say they’re “furious” at how much gas prices have gone up. They’re “upset” that the Red Sox fired Terry Francona. I’m not either of those things. I’m stark raving bat-shit angry. I’m someone-just-kicked-Bruce-Banner-in-the-johnson angry. That’s how angry I am.
There. Now that I have that out of my system, I’ll tell you why luddites make me angry.
There’s a very strange misconception out there, and it goes something like this:
Oh, if I’m constantly online, that means I’m spending less time with my family doing family activities. And if I spend less time doing those things, then that makes me a terrible mother/father/sister/brother/estranged relative.
Horseshit.
You know what makes you a better husband? Being a better husband. And that involves becoming a more caring person, being emotionally supportive, listening better, compromising, communicating more fluently, seeing things from your spouse’s perspective, and so on. Being a better husband has nothing whatsoever to do with technology, and technology is not preventing you from being a bad husband. Only you can do that.
There’s a really gigantic difference between snubbing your family and using technology to augment your life. The difference is so dramatic, in fact, that I can’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the case that the two are even remotely related to the same problem.
Here, let me illustrate with a few quotes that you’ll never in your life ever hear anyone say:
- I should really stop using my blender so much and spend more time with the kids.
- My wife and I agreed that our cars were too much of a distraction, so we decided to ditch them for the weekend.
- Honey, could you put the computer away for a minute and help me find a good chicken recipe for dinner tonight.
- If I threw away my cell phone completely, I’d have so much more time to talk to my friends and family.
…et cetera.
Now, let me be clear. If the internet is weighing you down with all its craziness, go ahead and ditch it for a weekend. There will be plenty of pics on icanhazcheezburger.com just itching to be chortled at when you’re ready to come back. But while you’re away, please – for the love of Tim Berners-Lee – don’t go around telling people you “unplugged” for the weekend. Because that’s disgusting.
The Big, Disgusting Thing in this country of ours is the mass of people who refuse to acknowledge that mankind has spent the past several thousand years developing tools to make life easier. You hear about them all the time: the 50-something who never bothered to set up an email account, the college professor who is inaccessible via Facebook, the middle manager who doesn’t know how to copy and paste text from a Word document.
Can you imagine being a caveman and not knowing how to sharpen a spear? Or not knowing how to skin an animal and wear its pelt for warmth? Or not knowing how to make a fire?
Can you imagine being ignorant of the mode d’emploi of a fountain pen? Or choosing not to switch from your slide-rule to a calculator? Or refusing outright to acknowledge the tremendous benefits of having electricity pumped directly into your home?
No, surely not. And yet these people likely existed, every one of them filthy savages.
Every. Last. One.
Yes, I’m throwing down the gauntlet here, to a degree. Your cell phone and your laptop and the internet represent some of the greatest achievements in technological history. They are your method of connecting with a network of information so vast that it was once literally beyond the scope of imagination. And there are those stalwarts – a few members of Congress come to mind – who would thwart our attempts at doing exactly what mankind has been doing for millennia: making life easier for ourselves and each other. Technology is the portal through which we might gain a larger perspective on the world around us. It is a tool for learning the best lessons that history has to teach us. Armed with that, how could we ever achieve less than our potential?
There is knowledge out there, friends. Avail yourselves of it.
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
RSS
The cavemen who didn’t know how to sharpen a spear died off. The same will happen to people who prefer to be unplugged.
There are a bunch of articles out there about people coming out of jail after 30 year prison terms who have never used a computer. They can’t even get a job at McDonalds because the application process is on a computer in the restaurant. Society has left these people behind. We’ve evolved. And there’s no turning back.
Until someone detonates a massive EMP and throws us all back into the stone age. or a zombiepocalypse.
I, for one, welcome our zombie overlords.
Me too. I have a machine gun with a shotgun attached to it and I’m ready for them. Plus I set up the “zombie treadmill defense” (google it).
I get your point. I really do. But you must have never met an addict. Because there are a lot of people out there who can’t have a conversation, can’t watch a movie, can’t drive a car without constantly checking email, texts, tweets, facebook, etc. They’re the ones always looking down with the glow of their smartphone lighting up their faces.
These people aren’t living a life that is enhanced and made better by technology. They’re suffering from a new type of attention deficit syndrome.
Just because I go on a diet doesn’t mean I hate food. It simply means I’ve been indulging in it more than is good for my health.
Like it.
Marion,
I think we can have a conversation about the relative detriment of luddites without talking about addicts. Addicts suffer from a disease, after all, and are in the vast minority.
And who are you to say that a person’s life isn’t made better by constantly gazing into a smartphone? It is not up to you — or me, for that matter — to judge the quality of another person’s life by your standards alone. That “addict,” as you say, may well choose to interact with the world via digital media because that’s what makes him happy. And if he’s not harming anyone or putting others at risk, then who are we to say he’s doing something wrong?
Saw this on my LinkedIn feed, and felt compelled to respond from the psychology perspective.
One of the challenges that being constantly “connected” through technology is that it presents a unique opportunity to, essentially, bilocate… be physically present and mindful in one situation, while also being “virtually” present and mindful in another situation happening in the technological sphere. We’ve always been able to be lost in our thoughts, but now we’re actually able to socially interact with others in two different spheres at the same time.
Except we actually can’t.
Large amounts of brain research has show that we as humans simply don’t multitask the way we think we do. We all believe we’re capable of doing more than one thing in the moment, but the research suggests that when we do, we’re doing a poorer job at both because our brains simply haven’t evolved to attend to more than one thing at a time yet (evolution moves at an exponentially slower pace than expansion of technology, after all). And yes, we all think we’re special and the exception to this rule… the research summarily suggests we’re not.
There’s a movement across certain disciplines of psychology (dilectical behavior therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction, specifically), that center on doing on thing in the moment, doing it fully, and moving on. The strategies are hghly effective for both those who experience symptoms of mental illness as well as those who don’t (myself included).
I certainly don’t judge the quality of someone’s life based on the amount of time they spend on technology, and for some folks with mental illness, it’s been a godsend. But acknowledging the limits of the human brain in what we can be fully present in is an important factor to consider in our “I can do it all” modern lifestyles.
Good perspective, Suzy, and nice to hear from you again.
Now, I was never very good at psychology, so correct me if I’m not understanding you, but I think I agree that we’re not capable of functioning at our peak when we’re doing more than one thing at a time. I can buy that. But respectfully, that’s not really what I was getting at. I was getting at this notion of being “wired” in a general sense — that is, frequently using technology to accomplish tasks of various degrees of complexity — somehow detracts from “really living.”
So yes, if I was the kind of person who took an always-on approach to technology — if I literally never stopped using it in any situation — then there are certain things that I would not do as effectively. But that’s not really how the majority of us, even the bleeding-edge tech nerds, use technology. We use it as a supplement to what some may call “really living.” We climb mountains, but we also post the pictures to Facebook. Does the posting of pictures to Facebook detract from the experience of having climbed the mountain? That seems downright backwards to me.
I don’t think that being “wired” inevitably detracts from real living, but I think it has that potential if it’s not used mindfully. If “wired” is your default (the “constantly online” you reference in the original post), then I think there is a risk of diminishing the quality of your experience in the “real world” because if you’re attending to the digitial one, you really aren’t capable of attending to the “real one,” at least not as fully or completely as you would otherwise. I think it’s about making a mindful choice of using technology as a means to an end, whether it be facilitating social connection, sharing ideas, or winning a bar bet by confirming an obscure piece of movie trivia.
And doing those things separate and apart from, and not simultaneously with, the “real world” stuff.”
Admittedly, part of the debate of early vs. late adopters and their attitude toward the state of “wired” is the fluency that one has with the technology. When you’re spending much of your energy on the mechanics of a medium (llike the fact that my parents still can’t send a text message without a tutorial), then you’re attending to that, and the message gets less attention. Whereas someone with greated “fluency” can easily shift attention to the digital world and easily shift back. For those with less exposure and skills, that becomes a much more difficult task.