Why staying offline is key to online survival
Any meaningful activity requires one to concentrate fully on it, whether it be repairing a watch, fixing a leaking tap, writing or painting. When Virat Kohli is on the cricket field, he’s not checking his phone in the drinks break. The only person in the world who can work and tweet at the same time is Donald Trump. Which is fine, for even Trump has never sent an email in his life.
We live in a constantly wired world. People reach for their phones the moment they wake up. The human mind has a limited ability to process information. We get up and are drawn into a vortex of WhatApp messages, Facebook, Twitter, email and websites with flashing news links. Each of these extracts its toll.
One is in a constant state of responding to messages, GIFs and jokes. It’s become part of social etiquette. If one doesn’t respond, people take offence. So you send a million smileys that mean nothing. As soon as you’ve stopped doing that, another hundred people have bombarded you with links about this and that.
A “haha” is not a person-specific response. You are supposed to provide a uniquely individual response to jokes that are being created on an industrial scale. WhatsApp groups involve “Friends” posting pointless videos in frenzy, and then spending hours deleting them.
Even with news, one headline can lead to another story and so on, until one has no clue of where one began. Soon one is processing information one doesn’t really need, and there’s no stopping. You keep clicking until you suddenly realise that you’re exhausted, that you clicked way above your weight, so to speak.
Compare this with starting your day with a newspaper or a walk or a couple of hours reading a book. You can end your day with it too. Anything that helps you concentrate on one thing.
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| One is in a constant state of responding to messages, GIFs and jokes. It’s become part of social etiquette. |
For what happens without that is that a scatterbrained anxiety takes over. There is little holding your centre. In this constant random checking of notifications and instant responses, we are losing our ability to have a necessary quiet within us. No wonder we are hearing of more and more people doing a “social media detox”. Others choose to go offline altogether for a period of time.
This isn’t easy to do. It’s an addiction and like any other addiction there are withdrawal symptoms. Perhaps the biggest fear of being offline is the fear of being left behind. Accompanying this is the fear of being bored.
Before the advent of mobile phones, we Indians spent a lot of time being bored. “Timepass” was a national problem. This was most evident on train journeys where peanuts were sold as “momfali timepass”. If there was no momfali around, passengers tended to stare into space.
But staring into space isn’t such a bad thing. You reflect on incidents and events, maybe to do with your life, maybe to do with politics and sport. You might have a conversation with fellow passengers about some of what you’ve been thinking. Anything is better than lapsing into your phone and filling the void with smileys and icons.
Going offline requires a plan. One can do it for a few hours in a day. For example, you don’t have to start your day by going online first thing. You don’t have to end it, lying in bed, scrolling down Twitter. You can switch off your phone when you’re reading. You cannot enjoy a work of literature if you’re constantly replying to arbitrary messages that keep popping up on your phone.
In September, Andrew Sullivan published a piece in New York magazine called “I Used to be a Human Being”. One of the world’s most-followed live political bloggers, he describes his life as being overtaken by “distraction sickness”: “Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes.”
It’s his doctor who finally lays down the choices available to Sullivan — and there’s only one: “If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”’ Sullivan soon finds himself in a large meditation hall, handing over his iPhone to a lady collecting everyone’s phones in a basket.
Expensive rehabs for online addiction are a reality. And while everyone thinks they can handle it, it’s worth thinking if the key to our online survival might lie in being offline.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)