Source: See others in this series by Ajit Johnson
Tag: Twitter
I was never completely where I was
David Roberts: Re-boot or Die Trying. One Man’s Year of Digital Detox:
[…] There was no such thing as caught up; there was, at best, keeping up. To step away from e-mail, news feeds, texts, chats, and social media for even a moment was to allow their deposited information to accumulate like snow in the driveway, a burden that grew every second it was neglected.
I spent most of my daytime hours shoveling digital snow. The core of my job—researching, thinking, writing at greater-than-140-character length—I could accomplish only in the middle of the night, when things calmed down. I spent more and more hours working, or at least work adjacent, but got less and less done.
Meanwhile, my mind and body adapted to the pace of digital life, with its ceaseless ping ping ping of notifications and alerts. I got twitchy if I was away from my phone for more than a few seconds. I felt it vibrating in my pocket when it wasn’t there, took it with me to bed, even to the bathroom. (I got pretty good at tweeting while I peed, to my enduring discredit.)
All my in-between moments, the interstitial transitions and pauses that fill the cracks of a day, were crowded with pings. My mind was perpetually in the state that researcher and technology writer Linda Stone termed continuous partial attention. I was never completely where I was, never entirely doing what I was doing. I always had one eye on the virtual world. Every bit of conversation was a potential tweet, every sunset a potential Instagram […]
Don’t miss the rest of the story here: Reboot or Die Trying. One Man’s Year of Digital Detox.
Image: “Crackphone” from Saltywaffle.com
The Vacation
Excerpt from wsj.com: “Have You Twittered Away Your Summer” by Danny Heitman:
“…As a veteran journalist, I’d be wary of following Twain’s example in disregarding an editorial deadline. But his larger point—that savoring the sheer joy of travel is more important than documenting it—resonates with special urgency these days, as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram compel us to chronicle every moment of a journey in real time. Can this kind of reportorial obsession destroy the very moment we’re trying to capture? Wendell Berry, writing a generation ago, thought that it could. In “The Vacation,” a poem published in his 1994 collection, “Entries,” Berry considers a tourist intent on faithfully recording his seasonal getaway:
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which the sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. . . .
And so the poem continues, with Berry’s exacting traveler translating each fleeting moment of his sojourn into the comfortable permanence of videotape. He’s so busy filming his day, though, that he forgets to live it. “With a flick of the switch, there it would be,” Berry writes of this homemade travelogue. “But he would not be in it. He would never be in it…”
Read more @wsj.com: “Have You Twittered Away Your Summer“
Image Source: Travel & Leisure. Photo courtesy of @danielkrieger: Halfeti along the Euphrates river in Turkey
Go cold turkey for Cash? A tough call.
Like me. Like ME. LIKE ME DAMN IT.
Bruce Feiler: For the Love of Being ‘Liked’ – For Some Social-Media Users, an Anxiety From Approval Seeking:
Walking through an airport newsstand this year, I noticed a novelty…I quickly snapped a photo and sent out a tweet to my modest list of followers…Then I waited for the love. I checked the response before passing through security. Nothing. I glanced again while waiting for the plane. Still nothing. I looked again before we took off. Nobody cared. My little attempt to pass a lonely hour in an airport with some friendly interaction had turned into the opposite: a brutal cold shower of social isolation.
We are deep enough into the social-media era to begin to recognize certain patterns among its users. Foremost among them is a mass anxiety of approval seeking and popularity tracking that seems far more suited to a high school prom than a high-functioning society…
…it all begins to seem a bit, well, desperate.
…Time for a rewrite, Mr. Shakespeare. This above all: to thine others be true.
…“In a lot of ways, the addictive part is in the anticipation,”
…”I noticed I get in this puppet situation,” she said. “I get bored, and there’s something compelling about being able to put something online, and all of a sudden there’s instant gratification of ‘They like me!’
…Maybe Warhol needs a rewrite, too: Today, everybody can be famous for 15 retweets.
…A growing body of research indicates how deeply our brains are wired to seek social approval.
Read full (and excellent) article at For the Love of Being ‘Liked’
Notes:
- Image: The Keep Calm-O-Matic
- Title: Shakespeare said: “The above all: to thine own self be true.” What does it mean? See here Wiki.Answers.com.
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