Do you dream of
electric sheep?
This morning..
..I woke up and left Facebook.
~
The nature of my relationship with Facebook, however, is not
the reason behind my decision to deactivate my account.
I am not a Facebook addict.
I do not have a smart phone with internet capability, or spend any more
than five minutes a day on Facebook. I
also do not feel Facebook is yet supplanting my physical relationships –
these (I hope) remain strong and grounded in honest reality. I do not even have particular issue with
people using Facebook to present a cleaned up version of themselves, or with
them using Facebook as an avatar.
Absolutely not really.
No, I left because of a wider concern about what the
internet and our relative dependence on it is doing to us, especially (why of
course!) ME.
~
Facebook, the internet, and ME.
Facebook, to me, is a portal to the World Wide Web. An alluring gateway to the endless prairies
of the internet one can wander through while the outside world turns over; the
infinite cyber space, where one can leap and bound from one hyperlink, one piece
of infotainment to another.
While much of this is fun, and at times highly stimulating,
is our (mine, yours?) recreational internet use worth anything beyond being an
exercise in light amusement, a means of simply passing (killing?) the time?
~
My fear is that I am at least in danger of changing as a result of my
internet use.
(oh no, not change!!)
As I use the internet with increasing frequency when at leisure
(on top of the 7-8 hours a day at work, 5 days a week), I worry my brain is
being re-wired in what in a neurological sense is a natural response to
learning a new environment, or way of being.
However, though it may seem a hyperbolic parallel, persistent
recreational use of internet can be thought of as similar to the experience of persistent
recreational drug use, namely front brain stimulants such as cocaine.
There is the same alluring portal (Facebook or Your Happy
Drug Pushing Friend), the energising and highly stimulating initial buzz (Your
Favourite Web Pages or The Hit), the feeling of being in tune with others (or
Being Online), and then as the transient effects wear off there ensues a futile
search for more of the same which can last,
have you trapped in a cycle, and leave you with a feeling of dissatisfaction
and discomfort at having foregone more Real experiences, whether it be reading
a book, painting a picture, walking in the countryside or enjoying the good company
of friends, pressing flesh etcetera.
My experience is that if this cycle of being continues for a concerted period of time, one’s attention fragments, and one’s capacity
for absorbing the information that one is presented with (the words on a page)
or surrounded by (new blossom on a tree) on a daily basis deteriorates, as well
as one’s real awareness and ability to internalise, reflect on the very
same information, and be moved (what do the words on this page actually say; what do they mean?
How lovely the new blossom on the tree; how beautiful the world around me; how in accord with nature I feel at this very moment).
Here, the internet ceases to become an accompaniment to our
lives, but one of the central components.
A central component that cannot satisfactorily account for
three fifths of real life – touch, taste and smell; a central component that
reduces us, partly, to emotionless hunter gatherers, continually in a heightened state of
alert, on the move to somewhere or nowhere, unwilling to, incapable of retreat.
Facebook is, for me, the bejeweled and dazzling door to the
incorporeal labyrinth of cyberspace where it is (too?) easy to get lost, and indeed
lose a part of your Self; a part of what it is to be human, a unique event, and
not simply a green-eyed infotainment junkie or a temporal novelty – cookies or no cookies.
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