Discuss: Am I Still Here?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:

Thanks, you are right.  Go outside!!

Powerful words and a strong message, but I feel you’re missing two pieces.

First, how many friends of yours do not own a cellphone? I know a few.

If you are addicted to checking email with your iPhone, it is perhaps because you chose to purchase the machine. Messages about penis enlargement and purchase requisitions are not going anywhere; the validation of your existence remains. So why do you check your mail five times every day?

Second, what about your children? Generation Z is the term currently used for kids born over the past decade. The Z above your heart may as well be a moniker for your young child who is increasingly being raised in a society where cellphones are given to middle schoolers and computing word processor programs, not pieces of paper and pencils, are the norm.

Might I suggest that Z is part of you as much as your children are part of you? The moment you turn one off, so goes the other. In this regard, the synergy between humanity and technology will grow more ubiquitous. The challenge is the balance.

Your article certainly rang some bells in my head (I have a twin, too) and reminded me that, just last night, with bourbon in hand, my b-i-l asked the theoretical question: “If you had the power to get rid of computers, internet and cell phones right now, would you?”  I didn’t know how I would answer, so I remained silent. Perhaps, I think, there is a way to compromise. My attempt at compromise is to share my nature journal with others by way of a blog -  (http://www.middlewoodjournal.blogspot.com). I only recently came up with this idea as a way to blend my world with my twin’s world, but I will say that the hours outside observing and drawing nature is much better for my psyche and my blood pressure than the hours in front of a computer screen.  I also love nature photography.  So, of course, my twin insisted that I put them online.  Sigh… In the end, I know that I am a little addicted to the internet, but hopefully my awareness of the problem will keep it from getting out of hand.  Here’s to hoping!
    Thanks for the article!

Wow, what a terrific essay.  Thank you.  I know that you are checking obsessively, but I’m comment number twelve for this post.  Twelve people so far.  You ARE here! 

I’ll end up linking to this essay on my blog, and then I’ll check my own blog stats every time I log in just to see the page hits climb. How totally satisfying.  (In fact, just by mentioning my blog here, I’m really hoping people might click on my name and come over and take a look . . . anything for validation.)

On a more substantive note, I had the same experience as Piper this past summer, when I camped and blogged my way across the country with my two small children.  The sense of connection was surprisingly rewarding.  Plus (and this is where the personal ethics get kind of murky), in a way I thought of my sharing this adventure as a way to encourage other people in my life to put down their iPhones and laptops and head outside, too, preferably with children in tow.

In four days I board a plane for South America to spend two weeks kayaking Chile’s Futaleufu River.  I’m tell myself that I’m still wrestling with whether or not to take the camera and laptop and blog the trip, but to be honest I already know what I’m going to do.  The nice thing about a trip like this one (or like Piper’s) is that I won’t be able to log in several times per day, that I’ll have some sort of sense of balance forced upon me.

Okay, enough for now.  But how thrilling that I can check the little box below to be notified of follow-up comments!  I’ll be chacking on my iPhone.

I’ve got an active online life myself, but it’s not email-related.  Mostly interaction on discussion forums related to my lifestyle(climbing).  And…my blog.  And…my online t-shirt shop. And….and….

I tried to Twitter, but it seemed so vacuous.  How was I to know when I signed up for Facebook just the other day that it’s Twitter on steroids?

oh….. my.

“Little white clouds were reefed on the horizon.”
” . . . the autumn sun transforming the cottonwoods into an absolute frenzy of color—each leaf a shining, blessed fountain of light . . .”

As long as you do not fail to write with such loveliness we will be rewarded. As long as we can still read and apprehend such loveliness the technologies will not have won . . . completely.

I’m guilty on all accounts. So guilty of the “Am I still here?” illness that I was driven to visit Orion and discover this article on that impulse alone: to satisfy a soul craving that my email box, RSS feeds, and iPhone had failed to quench after many attempts. Weirdly nice to find an article to chastise me on my addiction.

I love technology and news and embrace them whenever I can. The trick is to make sure the dog is wagging the Internet tail rather than the other way around.

So I’m going to put this down and hug my kids right now. And then figure out what’s missing ...

Anthony, thanks for hooking in the neuroscience. Some recent addiction models I’ve seen suggest that anything taken out of its natural context has a higher potential for abusive use, tolerance, and - when unavailable - withdrawl: all marks of addiction. Take alcohol or refined sugar as examples - both distilled out of more complex nutritive carbohydrate sources, both turned into substances to which our bodies and brains dramatically react, both of which lead to a subsequent physiological “crash” as they are processed and exit the system.

Consider these electronic media as a sort of distilled form of relationship - real face-to-face relationship that activates the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex in the brain, a primary center for attachment, bonding….and dopamine for the brain’s pleasure pathway. We’re getting just a sliver of what our brains truly crave, but that sliver activates the pleasure pathway enough that we are tempted over time to disdain “the real thing” for this electronic medium.

It gets more complicated from here, but thanks for highlighting indirectly that addiction is both a human and an ecological problem, not a character disorder that happens to an obscure category of people called “addicts.”