Everyone is doing it. Look around. It doesn’t matter if you’re at the airport or at the gym. I even saw a guy doing it in the men’s room last week. Is there no place that’s sacred anymore?
Yes, I watched a guy last week standing at a urinal, holding his “business” in one hand, and scrolling down his smartphone with his other. Really? Are we so addicted to our gadgets that we can’t take a pee without checking our messages?
The next night I was out to dinner at a nice restaurant with a friend. We were seated beside a family of three, a mother, father and their young son. The father had earbuds in and was listening to his music and scrolling through his messages, the mother was texting and talking on her phone and the 4-year old was playing games on his gadget. They sat there the entire dinner, about 45 minutes, and did not communicate with each other…at all!
The research is piling up that we are, in fact, developing mental disorders based on our online addictions. And yes, they are addictions. One recent study found that 35% of smartphone users checked their phones before even crawling out of bed in the morning.
More alarming is a recent Newsweek article, Is The Web Driving Us Mad http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/08/is-the-internet-making-us-crazy-what-the-new-research-says.html, that points out a myriad of articles, research and studies from around the globe that give credence to the rising epidemic of psychoses and mental issues caused by our online love-affair. Included among these was reference to the brains of Internet addicts looking like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts.
“In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found “abnormal white matter”—essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of atrophy.”
Of course, the non-scientific, anecdotal evidence is around us every day. Just yesterday, I had to swerve in the bike lane at the Golden Gate Park to avoid a fellow-biker who stopped in the middle of the road to respond to a text. She was completely oblivious to the oncoming traffic (which she was blocking).
Is it just me? I feel like I’m living in some kind of weird alternate universe where all signs of humanity have been decimated. Where human connection is not really human connection at all. Where people can’t go to dinner, the bathroom or for a bike ride without being connected to their virtual world.
Again, the research says that our internet and gadget attachment is making us less active in our real life. In other words, we are connecting to our virtual world at the expense of our real world connections. Just like the family ignoring each other at dinner. We are taking our most prized relationships and trading them for a ping of dopamine for the extra likes, retweets, texts or posts that are at our constant disposal.
I guess it’s time that we start thinking and stop texting (at least for a moment). For all the good that our online connections give us, is what we’re doing, at the level we’re doing it, really healthy?
If you’ve read this far without being distracted by an onslaught of online sirens, I’m hoping that this craziness may resonate with you as well. My hope for everyone is that we can all disconnect (at some level) from our gadgets and connect in real life, the old-fashioned way. That’s even crazy to think that ‘old-fashioned’ communication would be the notion of actually talking to someone. How quickly our lives have been changed in the last four years. (Did you know that the iPhone was not even available when Obama first campaigned for President?)
I’m not saying that you can’t have your technology and use it. But is it necessary to have it attached to you all day? That is a rhetorical question.
So here’s a test to see if your addiction may need an intervention:
- Do I carry my phone into the gym or grocery store?
- Do I check texts at stoplights when I’m driving? (Or worse, text while I drive.)
- Do I check my phone within 30 seconds of any ping, ding or fanciful ringtone alerting me of some activity?
- Do I talk, text or scroll through my phone when I’m having a conversation or a meal with another person?
Enough said.
