Internet Reflections and Reversals

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Like millions of others, I am terribly excited about the internet.  Social media makes it so easy to connect with people around the world.  YouTube, in particular, is a treasure trove of learning and enjoyment.  I love to think and tinker with ideas, and I love to study its practically limitless videos.  From Albert Einstein, and drawing on his tectonic equation E = mc², in order to help companies push their results further.  To Warren Buffet, and reflecting on his beguilingly simple approach to investing, such ‘Invest only in business that you can understand.’  To the Tour de France, as I am a cycling fanatic and I can’t get enough of racing videos to watch.

If you happen not to be convinced on how crazy revolutionary and exciting the internet is, have a look at this video by Erik Qualman.

Getting lost in the internet

Still, I know how easy it is to get absorbed on the internet, and lose touch with people in the physical world.  How easy to get caught up on the treadmill of answering my private messages, e-mails, SMSs etc., and often times it seems I fall behind anyway.  Then, I’m frustrated, and feel reluctant to go out and socialize.

So it is with these introductory words that I mention an intelligent, illuminating yet warm, approachable article that John Freeman wrote:  Not so Fast.

Slow down, feel the grass under your feet.

Everything we say needn’t travel at the fastest rate possible. The difference between typing an email and writing a letter or memo out by hand is akin to walking on concrete versus stroll­ing on grass. You forget how natural it feels until you do it again. Our time on this earth is limited, the world is vast, and the people we care about or need for our business life to operate will not always live and work nearby; we will always have to com­municate over distance. We might as well enjoy it and preserve the space and time to do it in a way that matches the rhythms of our bodies. Continuing to work and type and write at speed, however, will make our communication environment resemble our cities. There will be concrete as far as the eye can see.

Get physical, go out and have coffee with a friend.

A large part of electronic commu­nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

Pause and step back, don’t send.

We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from effi­ciency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.

Uncluttering, cleaning up

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Years ago I got into the habit of throwing things out regularly.  I had a large study in my house in Chicago, and on pickup day for trash and recycling, I made sure I had a few old magazines, papers, and other unwanted stuff in the bins.

Then, I lived in a flat in Dubai, and it was only about the size of my basement where I had my study.  Not much stuff here, that is.  Still, my communication and computing devices had loads of stuff that, in keeping with this habit, I regularly got rid of.  For example, I used a clean-up program to delete junk on my PC and “clear all history” on my browser, regularly.  I deleted old contacts, and friends who didn’t respond, on my smartphones and Skype.  I did the same with some contacts, groups and pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, and with some subscriptions and favorites on YouTube.  I quickly deleted e-mails I didn’t read anyway, or I simply unsubscribed to e-mail lists.

In this vein, I wrote about this poem:  'Delete' (February 2011).



So what stays are the people and things that matter most to us.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD