Tag: Internet

I went into rehab recently…

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I went into rehab recently. It wasn’t to treat substance abuse, though both drugs and alcohol are banned at the facility I checked myself into. Rather, I went to free myself from the noise that is disrupting our mental health in the 21st century.I shut off my phone and laptop and locked them away for three days. But this was more than a digital detox: I joined 50 other people in taking a vow of silence. Instead of scrolling or chatting, we spent hours in guided meditation and the rest of the time alone with our thoughts. As silent retreats go, this one was brief. But I had never kept quiet for so long in my life, and I hadn’t been without my electronics for that long since I got my first iPhone 18 years ago.

I craved the unplugging, but I was admittedly skeptical about elements of the experiment. I didn’t think I had the patience for meditation, and my few previous attempts at yoga typically ended with the administration of Advil. […]

But underneath all that woo, I also found something true. The silent unplugging made me appreciate, in ways I hadn’t fully understood, how much my phone has hijacked my attention. In the notification-free quiet, I wondered: Have I forgotten how to just be?

 Of course, the world’s religions have been practicing forms of monastic silence for thousands of years. The difference is those ancient orders, and even those who went on silent retreats in pre-smartphone decades, didn’t have Instagram accounts. Now, when we go into silence and turn off our devices, we are entirely isolated. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, this is disorienting.⁠⁠

⁠⁠I expected I would go through some digital withdrawal, and that happened. Dozens of times, I felt an involuntary urge to reach for my phone: to check the time, to take a picture, to see if the snow had canceled my flight, to look up “upma” before ladling some onto my plate, to order Valentine’s Day flowers, to find out what I was missing and who was trying to reach me. It felt unnatural not to be scrolling while waiting for a session to begin.

But something else happened during those three days that I didn’t expect — and it was frightening…

— Dana Milbank, read more here: “I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened.” (Washingon Post, February 13, 2026

Monday Morning Wake Up Call

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There are many reasons not to read a book. One, because you don’t want to. Two, because you started reading, crawled to page 17, and gave up. Three, because the idea of reading never crosses your mind. (If so, lucky you. That way contentment lies.) Four, because it’s Friday… Five, because reading a book is, you know so lame. Only losers do it. And, six, because you simply don’t have the time. But what if the need to read won’t go away.

The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without saying, is the small, flat box that you carry in your pocket. In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth. There’s no point in grinding through a whole book—a chewy bunch of words arranged into a narrative or, heaven preserve us, an argument—when you can pick up your iPhone, touch the Times app, skip the news and commentary, head straight to Wordle, and give yourself an instant hit of euphoria and pride by taking just three guesses to reach a triumphant guano.

This is where Blinkist comes in. Blinkist is an app. If I had to summarize what it does, I would say that it summarizes like crazy. It takes an existing book and crunches it down to a series of what are called Blinks. On average, these amount to around two thousand words…

Once you are Blinked in, your days will follow a new pattern. Instead of being woken by an alarm, or by a bored spaniel licking your face, you will find yourself greeted by a Daily Blink. This will arrive, with a ping, on your phone, alerting you to a book that, suitably pruned, is ready to be served up for your personal edification…

It’s easy to decry this stripping down of complex reasoning, as if the app were bent solely on decluttering books of everything that lends them vitality. Yet you have to admit: if you’d never read Pinker or James, Blinkist would furnish you with a basic grasp of their intent—sufficient, perhaps, to do more than merely drop their names. If the topics that Pinker addresses happened to crop up in conversation (“Everything is so crappy nowadays, worse than it’s ever been”), you could just about hold your own, at least over a cup of coffee. (“Well, there’s this guy, Pink-somebody, who says that infant mortality is way down.”) Is that what books are coming to, a handy social lubricant? Should you care if literature gets Blinked away, like an eyelash? […]

Such, to my dazzled eyes, is the crowning glory of Blinkist. Its high-tech alchemy, transmuting literature into business, turns the inhabitants of literature, even the ones with tattered wings, into businessmen. Listen, rapt, as the devils crunch the numbers and kick around ideas for going forward:

Moloch suggests open warfare against heaven. Belial advocates for doing nothing. Mammon argues for making hell a little nicer so they can all live a happy life of sin.

I’m with Mammon, all day long. Life is short, and so, if you look at your phone, is literature. Blink and you’ll miss it. 

— Anthony Lane, from “Can You Read A Book in a Quarter of an Hour? Phone apps now offer to boil down entire books into micro-synopses. What they leave out can be revealing. (The New Yorker, May 20, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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The beautiful thing in some ways about the smartphone, for example, is that my robotic vacuum will never do anything but vacuum instead of me. But my smartphone can be an instrument in that I can decide every time I pick it up whether I’m going to use it in a way that actually develops my heart, soul, mind and strength that is subordinate to and for the purposes of love.

If I pick up my smartphone and I develop a relationship with people I’ll never meet — influencers and celebrities — by watching videos, that diminishes me. But if I pick up my smartphone and I call my daughter or FaceTime her, that activates love and relationship. Basically, it’s using the thing to more deeply engage with the world rather than to retreat from my investment in the world.

— Andy Crouch, from “Nurturing Our Relationships in a Digital World” (The New York Times · Interviewed by Tish Harrison Warren · June 4, 2023). Crouch is the author “The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.”

Entire article is worth a read here.

Monday Morning Wake Up Call

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I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England… I live now when we fuss if our computer can’t bring us everything we want instantly. We deny time.

We don’t want to do anything with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time you deny space. After all, it’s a continuum—which separates us.

So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us.

​I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live.”

— Ursula K. LeGuin, Interview by Heather Davis. “Stories from wide open, wild country: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin” Hobo Magazine 16: 130-131. (2014)

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Modern life has clogged my skull to the limit. Technology has delivered an avalanche of options to preoccupy me at any hour; the notion of idle time that can’t be filled with some form of digital distraction is foreign to me, almost unnerving.

If you’re reading this column on a phone, or any sort of computer, you’re seconds away from all kinds of diversions—social media, digital games, the state of your 401(k), the latest celebrity embarrassment or political mess…

For me, the problem comes when I need to think for myself. If you read this column, you know that any kind of complicated thinking is hard for me, and perhaps impossible. My brain’s interior is not a series of mathematical formulas dancing around balletically, like it does for beautiful-minded geniuses in the movies. My brain is more like a slop-sink faucet, slowly dripping. Or an arcade machine that only plays 70’s-era Pong…

As I get older, I realize I need to utterly unplug. My ideas will not come from my phone, a Facebook post or the latest tire fire on Twitter. For me, they come from digital distance, from oxygen and exercise and especially from time spent outdoors. There once was a time I could get ideas from staring at websites, but not anymore. I get them from looking at trees…

I fear we’re getting worse. Technology just gets better, as those airport bookstores get smaller. I’m wary of our artificial-intelligence future, and the notion that we will lean on bots to think for us, writing code, speeches and even poetry. It sounds like more off-loading of our brain space to technology. And to what end? To watch more episodes of “Love Is Blind?”

I don’t want to sound like I’ve figured it out. I’m not saying this brain of mine is on the cusp of a breakthrough. My brain will not save the world. It barely remembers why it went to the supermarket.

But to get anywhere real, it needs to be uncluttered. It needs to be empty. I mean empty more than the usual. It needs to be bored. And for me that means: unplugged.

—  Jason Gay, from “The Joy of a Totally Empty Brain. Modern distractions cannot compete with the inspiration of old fashioned boredom (wsj.com, April 21, 2023)