I originally wrote this sometime last year. More and more every day I agree with its message and could even add more as well. This is my first post and I hope to have to many more!
We live in a connected world. As I sit here typing this, the PC I am on is connected to not only power, but the internet as well. I need this PC for multiple job functions to be able to do my work on a daily basis. I have never been trained to know how to do my work without a PC, because why would you ever need to do the work without a PC? But that isn’t the only way I am connected sitting here. My phone lying here is not only connected for phone calls, but messaging, the net and social media as well. I am never more than a few clicks away from seeing what is happening beyond my desk chair. Even our homes and cars are becoming more connected to the web of things. We are building water heaters that connect to your smart home, there are already thermostats for heating units, alarm systems and home automation that connect too. Even in the kitchen, there are refrigerators that have screens for connecting to the net, smart cooking and measuring devices to help guide you through recipes. As for our cars, a new feature becoming more widely available, 4G internet built into the car. Who needs a mobile hotspot to carry when your car is a rolling one? It seems like anymore we cannot get away from the web of things, the connectivity. What is this doing to us as a species? What kind of new health problems will emerge in the next decade because of the influx of wireless signals bouncing around us? These are just a few of the questions that have been plaguing my mind for a sometime now. I know I am not the only that has these questions bouncing around in my head. But here I will discuss some of my opinions about it, and some of my predictions. This is all purely my opinion from observation of the people around me on a daily basis. I did not conduct an experiment nor do I claim to be a subject matter expert. Just your average joe, making some observations on paper.
When I was my youngest daughter’s age, the closest to connected I came was spending a rainy day playing Super Mario Brothers on my NES. Growing up, we had a rotary dial telephone, barely any cable, kerosene heaters in the winter and window A/Cs and box fans in the summer. It would have been about 1992, which means the internet had only been available to public for roughly 10 years,(The internet as we know it today as given life in 1983 with the adoption of TCP/IP protocol that we still use) and was still considered a luxury like central heating and air. At 10 years old the closest I came to a computer was at school, the following year, when I would have been in 5th grade, I was given the opportunity to bring one home for a week. It was one of the old all in one IBMs that used 5 ¼” floppy. On top of that, the only word processor on the computer was Lotus, black screen and green type. No email, because there wasn’t any Wifi or broadband. Those that had internet, had dial up, and you couldn’t be on the phone at the same time either. My point here is this, and it is the same with every generation, we didn’t have all bells and whistles the kids these day have, and to be honest I think for the most part we were better off for it. I think maybe some examples are in order.
Twenty four hour news networks and that is in the plural. We didn’t have them. We didn’t have a constant stream of people’s opinions and bad news flooding our TV’s, computers, and homes. For the most part people got their news like this, in the morning you had your morning paper, morning TV news or morning radio news. Around lunch time they might come on with some news but mostly it was just local and silly stuff, then you got your evening news after dinner, either TV or radio. Now if something truly important or horrifying happened they might interrupt the show you were watching long enough to tell you the basics then they were gone. But, today, it is a constant stream of “information” and I use that term lightly. It also depends on which network you watch on what side of the story you will receive. MSNBC tells the story with a completely different filter than say Fox News, but we won’t get into that here. Everyone says, “it seems like more bad stuff happens these days than when I was younger.” While this may or may not be the case, without actually looking at the statistics I would have to say we probably just hear about it more now than then. A good case in the point is the racial tension news that has been bombarding us of late. Now first of all let me say this, I am not down playing any of these situations and I will try my best to not state my views on them. Recently, it all started with Michael brown and Ferguson, MO. This tragedy, no matter what side you are on it is a tragedy, was at state news. It should have never made national news; those living in Chicago should have never seen it on their nightly news. It was blown up by the national media, they needed their axe to grind for the week and it ended up dragging out and causing more problems than it should have. I truly in my heart believe that if the nation as a whole had never seen it on the nightly news, the rioting and destruction that followed would have never happened. As a side note here, social media was as much to blame as well. This is another topic will touch on later. Ferguson then of course lead to the event in New York, then another out west. Even if they are newsworthy, that doesn’t mean we need to see it picked apart and repeated for weeks on end on twenty four hour news networks. The point here is there is such a thing as information saturation. Somehow, somewhere along the live we have been a media centric, information consuming race. I do believe knowledge is power, but only if that knowledge does us any good. We have been ignorant to what was going on in Ferguson, MO on a daily basis when I was younger, but we are not any better off today knowing this information we lacked then. This need for so much information at our fingertips leads to our next difference, our reliance on the internet for our information.
When we first got the internet it my home, I was in middle school, probably sixth or seventh grade. We had a hand me down HP desktop tower, one with the really big tube type monitors. Most kids today wouldn’t know what the monitor was if they actually saw one. Our internet was dial up, we had to get a special feature on our phone line that would allow to dial a three digit number before we got online so that we wouldn’t get knocked off when someone tried to call. People with call waiting were the only ones that needed this feature. That song you might be downloading right now, would take as long it does for say Call of Duty Advanced Warfare to download onto your PS4 and that is you were lucky. Sometimes a song would take hours, downloading an album forget it you don’t have enough hours in the day. Webpages took minutes to load instead of mere seconds like today. A Facebook page, not that it was even around yet, would take all night to load just the statuses with the thumbnail profile pictures, forget about downloading anyone’s video or selfies they posted. It would be years before we got cable internet, we skipped T1 lines and DSL altogether. I actually didn’t use the internet that much, every now and then for school projects, but it was so slow that I didn’t do this much. I still relied heavily on something most kids today know nothing about, getting my information from the library. When I did a project or research paper my information came from books, encyclopedias, magazines and newspaper archives. There was no Wikipedia, ehow.com or what have you. But today, and I am as guilty as the next person, the information is at our fingertips, on demand. We Google what we need to know, what was initially a proper noun naming a search engine has been changed into a verb, we Google everything. Who needs to remember information anymore, when it is within your grasp any minute of the day? And at the end of the day, if we haven’t seen it on Facebook, then it must not have happened. This brings me to the next topic, how we all share our lives, every minute of our day, with perfect strangers and no regard to possible long term consequences.
Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare and any of the other countless others I cannot recall right now. Our social networks, our blogs, our pictures our every move, we share them all without stopping to think, does anyone really want to or need to know what I am cooking for dinner (again, guilty as charged). Does this person I barely knew high school really want to know how many calories I burned during my workout today, or how bad I feel my day at work was? The indisputable answer to these simple questions and many others along this line of thinking is a resounding NO! No one on my friends list or yours need to know our every move, as much as you love your kid and think they are best thing since sliced bread, no one on your list wants to see them. But wait you say, if that is the case then why are there so many people on my friends list and why do I have so many likes on said post? The answer is actually quite simple, somewhere along the way, it has been the socially responsible thing to do. When you see a picture or a post from a “friend” online, you like it or make a cute comment. Because our brains have been wired to tell us if we scroll by this and we don’t do these actions someone might take offense to it or even worse say something about you not being sociable. I don’t know exactly when this change in our behavior happened but I do know it happened with the inception of social media. When it became ingrained in our everyday life, our every move, we changed the way we fundamentally think. Before social media no one ever sat around and thought, “hey I wonder what that person I had nothing to do with in school that now live God knows where is doing right now? I should like to know so I can show my excitement and approval for them.” Someone thinking this would have probably been labeled as a little weird in my opinion. But today, if our news feed doesn’t update so we can see what Joe Blow is up to we have a meltdown. Facebook outages make the news, the news! How is that news worthy? And all of this we post, all this information we have heedlessly put out on the information highway, is there forever. Even if you delete it, somewhere out there it is still accessible. Then you find out when you need a new job, and think,” hey my Facebook feed is going to affect if I get his job. What did I post over the years? Is there anything that I now regret sharing or saying? All those political rants and posts about my bosses and my coworkers, are the still on there?” We share too much information with too many people. If Facebook, Instagram and others was only for our close friends, our true real life close friends, this probably would not be too bad. But it is not, I have people following me on Instagram for instance that I don’t even know, I don’t know where they live or what they do outside of what they chose to post. How did my rational mind ever come to the conclusion that this was ok and safe? How did this become socially acceptable and expected? And this isn’t even the worst of it, again in my opinion. We as adults have shown our children that we do this, so therefore it is ok. Then it goes a step further, you son or daughter starts sharing more of themselves online, predators have access to this. Or maybe they get real adventurous and one day you discover they have been sexting, another new word courtesy of our digital age. You think to yourself, “how did they ever come to the conclusion that it was ok to share a naked picture of themselves with someone?” and, this still isn’t the worst of it. Then your child and their boyfriend/girlfriend break up, the person that received this picture feels they need to get even or just think it is fun to share the picture. Now, it is everywhere, your child is being ridiculed and possible being charged with distributing child pornography. Now the question becomes even more thunderous, “How did this happen, what made my child think this was ok?!” The answer again is fairly simple, we as the adults have opened the door. By sharing their lives on our pages from day one they have no boundaries. They have no concept of personal space or privacy. The blame ultimately as always falls on the parents. No matter what we think, it is ultimately our fault. We have led them down this path and at this point, when this kind of thing happens, turning back is almost impossible. We lay our lives at the feet of the internet and the masses connected to it. We actual go through withdrawals when we cannot connect. You sit there and think as you read this, “No, not me. I can disconnect anytime I want to.” I say to you, try it. Try a week, or day or even just an hour of not picking up your phone or using your pc to pass the time. Then come back and tell me you can do it. Because I believe the majority of us, cannot. I know I can’t, not for extended amounts of time.
Now sitting here, after you have read my jumbled train of thought you ask yourself or those around you, “What do we do from here?” This time I am afraid the answer is not so simple or clear. Honestly I am not even sure I know where to begin as a population, but I know where my family and I will begin. It will have to be a process, a slow one at that. Like any other addiction, and we cannot kid ourselves that is what this has become for most people, we cannot safely go cold turkey and just quit. We will maybe start as a family by limiting the number of people our “friends” lists to people we only personally know, and with this cutting back on what we share on a daily basis. When we have completed this and mastered it, we may find we will be able to cut ties with social media all together, this is my hope. If we cannot cut it out completely, then the times of days we access it will be restricted. Periodically we as a family will go through a tech detox if you will. But ultimately I think it is very important that we completely eliminate our dependency on an always on mentality. And whatever it takes to get there I am willing try, my family will take some convincing, but I am already there. I have had this weighing on my mind for too long now and what I see of our future scares me. I may not be able to change the world, but I can change how much of us the worlds see, and how we perceive the world around us. In the end, my only true goal is protecting my family, but it doing so if I can also help someone else along the way I will. That is the socially responsible thing to do. To help your neighbor overcome a trail in their life, or to save another life while trying to save your own.
Written by: J Snapp 02/2015
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