I've been developing a taste for digital asceticism. I'm rebuilding my attention span and trying to live my life out in the real world for a change. I'm an old-timer. I've been online almost since there was an internet. It was very different back then, and I'm not sure it's changed so much for the better.
I got to remembering what it was like before mobile phones and the internet were ubiquitous. Most people didn't even have internet access, let alone a computer until I was well into my 20's. They went to each other's houses and went out together even if it was just to the park or the video arcade or whatever, but it was done in the real world. They didn't need to know each others' every thought. They had more of an attention span than they do now, and that's saying something because we were brought up on television, and our attention spans had already been drastically reduced by that. Now it's even worse. My generation is perhaps the last generation that will remember growing up without a phone that went everywhere with you and had more computing power than the computer that launched the moon missions. We didn't have all of the information and arrant bullshit ever conceived of by man at our fingertips. If we wanted bullshit, by god we had to go out looking for it or make our own. We had to learn through trial and error.
After I stopped spending time on social media or spending much time on the internet in general I have started getting my attention span back. I started having meaningful conversations with people on our own terms. I prefer it a great deal to Facebook because it prioritizes quality over quantity. It's more personal and it's deeper. It turns out that interacting online isn't a good substitute for spending time with people in person. Social media seems to only increase feelings of isolation because it's a substitute for human contact that reminds us on some level of what we are missing out on in the real world. I know too many people for whom the only social contact they get anymore is on the internet, and I can't help but feel sad because for a long time I was one of them.
In a sense it reduces even friendship to an abstraction. Maybe that isn't so healthy. It's just my own opinion, but maybe we need to see each other more as flesh and blood human beings with lives in the here and now. Maybe we need to start paying attention to each other and get outside a little more. People used to "go visiting", and as they didn't have mobile phones back then they didn't always call first but would drop by simply because they were in the neighborhood. They used to have people over for dinner or sit around playing cards and board games and having conversations. It's not like it was perfect or anything. There was a lot of drinking and things that went on behind closed doors, but we didn't have the capability of doing some of the things that people do today, like committing terrible acts on a live video stream, for example, or posting revenge porn to the world at large. We were much more limited in our reach and our audience. Thank god for that.
The world is changing. It has been changing the whole time that we have been alive. We seem to be faced with the choice of letting it develop naturally and outside of our control, or exerting some control over it by deciding by consensus that we have different priorities. For me it becomes a digital fast, limiting my time spent online in favor of time spent doing the things I need to do for my life. I'm not walking away entirely, obviously or I wouldn't be posting to a blog, but I can't live my life online. It's not a substitute for the real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment